Arts

30 Sep 09

Dr Jim Adams's research on Latin linguistics has illuminated the social history of the Roman world.

Jim Adams, Senior Research Fellow in Classics at All Souls, has been awarded the British Academy’s Kenyon Medal for Classical Studies and Archaeology.

Dr Adams, who works across the Classics and Linguistics Faculties, will be presented with his medal this week.

Sir Frederic Kenyon (1863–1952), elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1903 and served as its sixth President and second Secretary, bequeathed a sum to the Academy to provide a medal to be awarded biennially to the author of some work relating to classical literature or archaeology.

Professor Aditi Lahiri, head of the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics, said Dr Adams was deserving of this year’s award due to his 'phenomenal contribution to the understanding of non-standard varieties of Latin, Latin in contact with other languages, and the regional diversification of Latin, illuminating the social history of the entire Roman and post-Roman world'. 

She said: 'He is widely acknowledged to be the foremost Latin linguist of our age. The Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics is delighted and proud that he has been awarded the Kenyon medal.'

And Nicholas Purcell, Faculty Board Chair for Classics, added: 'Dr Adams has published extraordinarily extensively on Latin texts of all varieties and from all periods up to the emergence of recognisable Romance languages.

'Central to his interests is the way Latin varied over time, place, social context and situation; but in pursuing this interest he has made major contributions in many areas of Latin grammar (word order and the Latin sexual vocabulary being only two), and provided detailed philological analyses of literary, sub-literary, and far-from-literary texts. His major recent works Bilingualism and the Latin Language and The Regional Diversification of Latin completely revolutionise our knowledge of spoken Latin.'