British Academy awards Global Professorship to Dr Erich Round

Award-holders under the Global Professorships programme will lead research across a broad range of disciplines from the humanities and social sciences, with Dr Round’s project: Accelerating our Discovery of the Linguistic Past, focusing on the understanding of our global human past through linguistics.

Global Professorships provide scholars with the opportunity to relocate to the UK for four years to pursue individual research goals while contributing to UK research and higher education.

This appointment provides Dr Erich Round with the opportunity to expand the foundations of an evolutionary theory of linguistic systems of word formation, such as verb conjugations and noun declensions. The aim is to create new opportunities for the evaluation, refinement and exploration of our scientific understanding of language change. In doing so, the project emphasises interdisciplinary parallels between theories in linguistics and related models in fields such as cultural evolution, and seeks to demystify the potential of mathematical modelling for scholarly inquiry into linguistic history.

Prior to this appointment, Dr Erich Round was on secondment as a Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Jena, Germany, and in 2018 was a British Academy Rutherford Fellow hosted by the Surrey Morphology Group. Dr Round was also a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Associate at Yale University, where he received his PhD in Linguistics.

Regarding his new appointment, Dr Erich Round said: “I’m excited to be joining the world's leading research group in morphology at the University of Surrey, and to do so under the auspices of such a prestigious British Academy programme.  I look forward to conducting grounding-breaking new research into the evolutionary trajectories of human languages, in a highly stimulating environment at the Surrey Morphology Group.”

Find out more about our Linguistics PhD research course.