The Faculty is pleased to announce that Professor Nicholas Zair has been awarded a 3 year Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship from 2026-2029 for his project Understanding Oscan.
The Fellowship will allow Nick to spend the next three years working on Oscan, which was spoken widely across Southern Italy between the fifth and first centuries BC – for instance, at Pompeii for most of the city's life. But no literature written in Oscan has survived, and our only literary sources of evidence for the polities and peoples of ancient Italy come from Greek and Roman descriptions, which naturally focus on the interests of Greek and Roman elites. Our only sources from the point of view of Oscan-speakers are inscriptions which have survived down to the present day.
The project will bring to light the society and culture of Oscan-speakers in their own words.
The main way of understanding Oscan inscriptions is to identify words which are connected with related languages such as Latin; these connections can only be made by careful investigation of the development of Oscan's sound-system (phonology) over time, and its complex relationship with the numerous alphabets used to write Oscan. In the course of the project, Nick will write a book focussing on these aspects of the language aimed at specialists, as well as a Grammar of Oscan, co-written with colleagues, which we hope will help to provide access to the words of Oscan-speakers for historians, epigraphers, and anyone else interested in Ancient Italy.