Dr William Short

Prior to joining Exeter’s Department of Classics & Ancient History in 2017, I held posts at The University of Texas at San Antonio and Loyola University, Maryland. I earned my Ph.D. in Classics from the University of California, Berkeley in December 2007. My areas of specialization are Latin language and literature, Roman cultural history, cognitive semantics, and cultural anthropology. My research interests rest at the intersection of language, culture, and cognition, and in this area I have been pioneering an approach to ancient Roman culture inspired by Lakovian conceptual metaphor theory. I am also interested in language pedagogy, particularly in how teaching students to make inferences from what M.A.K. Halliday called the “context of situation” and “context of culture” can aid in linguistic and literary understanding. At the same time, I am developing several Digital Humanities projects that apply cognitivist approaches to classical lexicography and to corpus search.

Phone: (01392) 724794

Office: Amory B265

Office Hours: M 10:30-11:30am, W 9:30-10:30am or by appointment

Research supervision:

I am open to discussing research proposals on any subject within my general fields of expertise. I would be especially happy to consider working with candidates interested in applying theories of the cognitive sciences, linguistics, or anthropology to the study of the ancient world. Topics of research could include: the metaphorical structuring of concepts; the relation of image and text; representations of the divine; ritual practices; kinship structures and terminology; myths, legends, and folklore; oratory and rhetoric – but any interdisciplinary, theoretically informed project relevant to Greek or Roman culture could be appropriate. Since my own research has often included a comparative approach, I encourage projects that seek to shed light on classical antiquity through productive comparison with other cultures, ancient or modern.

I invite candidates who are interested in working with me to send a 500 word précis of their proposed research topic and a copy of their curriculum vitae.