Supervisor – Dr Sheila Watts

Research Topic - The Development of Morphological Affixes in Abstract Nouns in Old High German and Old Saxon

About Me – Before starting his PhD at the University of Cambridge, Adam completed his MPhil degree also at Cambridge in Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic (2021-22) and his BA in French and German Language (2015-2019) at the University of York. In between his BA and MPhil degrees, he completed a PGCE in Modern Languages at the University of Oxford and worked as a secondary school German and French teacher in Oxfordshire. He has also worked in various positions at college and departmental libraries in Oxford and Cambridge during and in between his various degrees.

Research – Adam’s research is primarily focused on the morphology of abstract nouns in Old High German and Old Saxon. In terms of methodology, he is a corpus linguist, using data to support his research into the older Germanic languages. Adam is very keen to use the many different tools available to humanities’ researchers to conduct his research, emphasising in his work the importance of the digital humanities.  

He also has side interests in semantics, Old High German/Old Saxon grammar more broadly, Old English poetry, and comparative Germanic philology.

Scholarships/Prizes – Tiarks/Schröder Scholarship

Conference Papers – Morphologizing Abstractness: The Old High German Abstract Noun Suffix -heit (‘Abstract Concepts, Perception, and Language: What we think and how we say it’ Workshop; April 2024)