Madeleine Riskin-Kutz (USA/France)

I’m pursuing an MPhil in ancient history, focusing on ancient multilingualism, language mixing, the loss of predominantly unwritten languages under Greek and Roman colonisation and their adaptation to the alphabets of the colonising tongues.

I also work on language revitalisation in the modern context. I did my B.A. in Classics and Linguistics with a minor in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, where I had the chance to work on a project on the Iskonawa language of the Peruvian Amazon. I have also been involved for the past couple years in an ongoing project on the indigenous Alabama language, spoken in East Texas, for which I do phonological and phonetic documentation and fieldwork, and help to adapt a form of the Latin alphabet that is consistent enough for Alabama educational materials.

As part of my broad interest in languages, I’m also interested in animal communication and its study using methodologies typically applied to human linguistics. I have worked on projects studying communication in rodents and in cetaceans. I’m especially interested in cetacean bioacoustics, and the destructive consequences of human activity in the oceans for them.

I’m Franco-American and grew up in Berkeley, California and Paris, France. Outside of academics I enjoy playing music with friends (from folk to classical to rock, on the fiddle and piano and trying to learn the electric bass), reading, hiking, swimming, talking about whales, and lying on the floor with my dog.

I am extremely grateful to the Ertegun Scholarship programme for giving me the opportunity to continue my studies at Oxford. I think the study of the humanities is essential to a free, democratic society, and is currently under threat throughout the world. Nothing could be more important than fostering intellectual community and I’m so happy to be a part of the wonderful community at Ertegun House.