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I am a historical sociolinguist.  At UWA, I am Chair of Modern European Languages and senior lecturer in Italian Studies. After my PhD, I completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Stockholm University, then taught at ANU for several years before returning to Perth.

Within Italian Studies, I have specific interests in language change in the history of standard Italian and Gallo-Italian varieties; historical multilingualism in the Italian peninsula; language/dialect contact and language ideology in the Early Modern Period. Much of the material I work with makes use of unpublished and unconventional archival manuscripts to deal with questions of linguistic variation in the past. 

My first book looked at early evidence for tuscanisation in non-literary texts sent from Milan in the late fourteenth century. A second, co-authored book, provided a study of the nearly 200 extant letters held in the New Norcia Archive and written in Italian by a priest in colonial Western Australia. A third volume has recently been issued by Brepols, entitled Languages and Cross-Cultural Exchanges in Renaissance Italy (co-edited with Dr Alessandra Petrocchi, University of Oxford). With Professor Anita Auer (U Lausanne), I have edited a special issue of Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics on the role of merchants in language standardisation. I am currently preparing a fifth volume, on issues of the early circulation of language and supralocalisation in Renaissance Milan for De Gruyter [contracted].

I am part of the research groups UWA Medieval and Early Modern Studies, UWA Space Centre (Emotions in Space research node), a current affiliate member of ANU’s Centre for Early Modern Studies, an associate of the ANU Centre for Digital Humanities Research, and a former affiliate of the ARC’s Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language. I am the former stream leader for historical sociolinguistics at ANU’s Centre for Research on Language Change. I am part of the editorial board for the journal La lingua italiana: storia strutture testi published by Fabrizio Serra, Rome, current treasurer for the Languages and Cultures Network for Australian Universities, and a former Acting Deputy Head for the School of Humanities at UWA. I am the 2025-26 Australian European University Institute Fellow, and will be based at the EUI in early 2026.

You can hear more about me and my research here, here and here.