Graduate Profile | Sólveig Hilmarsdóttir

Sólveig is in the third year of a PhD in Latin linguistics and literature, funded by a Gates Cambridge Scholarship

I moved to Cambridge for an MPhil in Classics in 2021, after completing a double B.A.-degree in Latin and Greek at the University of Iceland in Reykjavík. The Faculty of Classics at Cambridge was my department of choice for graduate study as it is one of the world᾽s leading centres for linguistic approaches to the Greek and Latin languages and literatures. My MPhil on the sociolinguistics of Ovid᾽s exile poetry was in part funded by one of the generous Master᾽s bursaries offered by The Philological Society, one of which is normally awarded to a student working on ancient languages (the Anna Morpurgo Davies Master᾽s Bursary), and by my college, Jesus. During the MPhil, I had the great fortune to be awarded a Gates Cambridge Scholarship to begin my PhD work in 2022.

My research falls under the area of Latin sociolinguistics. I use the corpus of Ciceronian epistolography from the first half of the first century BCE to examine the connection between an author᾽s societal background and their use of Latin. I am interested in all kinds of variation in the Latin language: lexical, morphological and syntactic. Using the socio-historical background information we have about Roman authors is a very underutilised way to examine social variation in Latin and I hope to contribute to research on language use and language diversity in the late Roman Republic. I am lucky to be working with a wonderful combination of supervisors whose expertise covers the different areas of my work; my primary supervisor Professor James Clackson is an authority on the historical sociolinguistics of Latin and my secondary supervisor Professor Ingo Gildenhard is an expert on Latin literature, including Ciceronian epistolography.

Scholarly expertise aside, what makes Classics at Cambridge so special are its lively social aspects. One of its great strengths is to have the Classics library in-house as well as a common room for graduate students as the common room typically becomes crammed with lively conversation at breaktimes from the library. There are various informal social gatherings too – I am for instance happy to have found lots of other keen knitters among the graduate students! There is also a graduate representative in Classics (a role I held a couple of years ago) who helps oversee the well-being of the graduate community, for instance by organising social events. The academic side of things is also very convivial; the weekly research seminars in term-time are always followed by drinks at the nearest pub (the Granta); on lucky occasions the faculty even buys dinner for graduate students!

I have enjoyed belonging to the tight-knit graduate community immensely and I felt welcomed from the very start by students, staff and academics alike. This strong community has also helped smoothen the transition from the MPhil to the PhD which comes with a series of new (but fun) responsibilities and opportunities, such as supervising undergraduates and teaching language classes for those who apply for a position as a Postgraduate Teaching Assistant. The teaching experience I have had as a PhD student at Cambridge has also awarded me additional opportunities, such as teaching Greek in the JACT Greek Summer School at Bryanston.

The faculty and my college have provided me with a number of extraordinary opportunities during my time at Cambridge. Often, open-access publishing is paid for, for instance. I have also received travel funding to visit classical sites in Rome and in Italy more widely, and to present at conferences in numerous places in Europe and in the US. I further spent last fall as a visiting fellow in the Department of the Classics at Harvard in the US which was a great opportunity to get to know another superb Classics department and to take advanced graduate courses on topics like the Greek dialects.

Overall, I couldn᾽t be happier to have got the opportunity to do my PhD work at Cambridge. As an international student, this would never have been possible without the generous academic funding I have received. I am excited to keep working on research in the field once I complete my PhD and hopefully to help train the next generations of university students in Classics.

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