Please see giosuemarrone.com

I'm a historical sociolinguist.  At UWA, I am Chair of Modern European Languages and Associate Professor 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. I have been Acting Deputy Head for the School of Humanities.

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 Much of the material I work with makes use of unpublished and unconventional archival manuscripts to deal with questions of linguistic variation in the past.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). I have edited a special issue of Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics (with Anita Auer, Université de Lausanne) on the role of merchants in language standardisation, as well as a Festschrift in honour of E/Prof Kinder (with Marinella Caruso). I am currently preparing a sixth volume, on issues of the early circulation of language and supralocalisation in Renaissance Milan for De Gruyter [contracted].

At UWA, I am part of the research groups Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Frontier Technologies and Society, and the International Space Centre (Emotions in Space research node). I am 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 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, and an elected fellow of the Associazione per la storia della lingua italiana. Currently I am part of the Executive Committee as Treasurer for the Languages and Cultures Network for Australian Universities and a Director of the Australasian Centre for Italian Studies. 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.

I welcome Honours, Master's, and PhD thesis proposals on the above topics. However, due to the high volume of enquiries, I can only respond to prospective students who submit a 5-page proposal that aligns closely with my research expertise.

Current and previous dissertation topics include:

*Dante in the Anglosphere: an excursus in neologism and translation (PhD)

*Anglo-Italian Linguistic Contact during the Renaissance, 1300-1500 (PhD)

*A Corpus Linguistic Study in Syriac. Definiteness and change in the noun phrase (PhD)

​*Becoming adults elsewhere. The recent migration of young Italians to Australia (PhD)

*Heaven in the Secular Age: Analysing 21st century translations of Paradiso 30 (MTransSt)

*Exploring teacher perceptions of assessment in languages: The French Language Progression Framework K-10 (MPhil)

*Multilingual merchant writing in Early Modern Asia: trade networks, standard languages, and incipient norm creation (BPhil)

*On the Role and Participation of Men at Santa Marta, 1405-1454 (Honours)

*Transfer of loanwords and code-intermediate phenomena from English to Italian in merchant letters sent from London to Genoa in the Datini network, 1392-1401 (Honours)

*Persistence and Innovation of the -isc- Inchoative Infix in Three Dictionaries Concerning Infinitive Forms in Southern Calabrian Dialects (Honours)

*Exploring the migrant in Italian cinema: the case of Marco Tullio Giordana’s Quando sei nato non puoi più nasconderti and Cristina Comencini’s Bianco e nero (Honours)