Welcome to my personal website!

Ciao! I’m Valentina. I am a PhD candidate in Indo-European Studies at UCLA, working under the supervision of Prof. Brent Vine and Prof. David Goldstein. My dissertation explores how language technology, quantitative methods, and computational approaches can shed light on processes of lexical change in Latin, with a particular focus on the changes brought about by the spread of Christianity.

During the 2024-25 academic year, I was a visiting PhD student in the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London, where I worked with Dr. Barbara McGillivray on embedding approaches to lexical semantic change detection.

More broadly, my interests lie in the sociolinguistic and contact phenomena related to the Indo-European language family, especially within the Italic and Celtic branches, as well as the integration of quantitative, statistical, computational, and corpus-based methods into historical linguistics. While I consider myself a historical linguist, I also enjoy engaging with theoretical linguistics. I have been interested in syntactic theory, in particular issues of agreement and referential hierarchies, but I will prick up my ears at other areas of linguistics as well.

Before coming to UCLA, I earned an MPhil in Classics from the University of Cambridge, where I specialized in Classical and Comparative Philology and Linguistics, and a BASc degree from University College London.

Thanks for stopping by – feel free to explore the site to learn more about my work!