The Encyclopaedia of Shakespeare’s Language project has just welcomed three new members to its team who will be working part-time on low-frequency items. Find out a little more about them below:
Luke Wilding:
I completed my undergraduate degree in English Literature at the end of 2016, and I am now completing a masters through research. During my year off, I worked on the Encyclopaedia of Shakespeare’s Language project and focused on demonology, religious, and musical terminology. Pior to university, I worked as a professional classical musician, so this was an good hybrid of my two interests. I also wrote a couple of blog posts for the project last year which are up on the website (here and here). At present, I have returned to Lancaster to complete my masters through research on the topic of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and its relationship to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of the rhizome. I am currently working on Shakespeare’s political and economic language. During my prior work on the project, I enjoyed finding interesting early-modern terms which have fallen out of use as well as a number of highly-complex and nuanced ideas which no longer figure in modern thought. I am excited to return to the project for the chance for a similar acquisition of knowledge in an entirely different subject-area.
Isolde Van Dorst
After completing my undergraduate degree in English Language and Culture in both the Netherlands and in London, I then decided to focus more on linguistic analysis in my masters. I completed a double masters degree in both the Netherlands and in Malta in computational linguistics, expanding on my knowledge of statistical/computational approaches to linguistics . Drawing on research from digital humanities, I kept my focus on English and decided to write my thesis on Shakespeare’s use of pronominal address terms. Throughout this period, I worked closely with Jonathan Culpeper and the rest of the team, and spent a few months working in Lancaster to write my thesis. Now I am back on the project, mainly to work on the low-frequency items in the category of “food”.
Becky Hoddinott
I’m a second-year undergraduate student in both Linguistics and English Language, with a current focus on media and discourse analysis. My role in the project is studying the “foreign” words found within Shakespeare, so I will be looking at items from Latin, French, Italian, and Spanish; defining them; and examining corpus databases to discover whether these words were occurring elsewhere in English over that same period. I’ve really enjoyed working on the project so far; I’ve always enjoyed studying languages, and being part of this project is certainly putting my skills to good use. As a keen historian and avid reader, I was truly excited by the prospect of working on this project in particular, and having completed Lancaster’s online course in corpus linguistics, I was keen to gain some more experience in this particular area of research.