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 work focuses on the implementation of language technology for the study of semantic change in Latin.

More broadly, my interests lie in the sociolinguistic and contact phenomena related to the Indo-European language family, especially the Italic and Celtic branches. While I consider myself a historical linguist, I have a soft spot for theoretical linguistics at large. I have in passing 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.

This academic year (2024-25), I am enrolled as a visiting student in the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London, where I am learning more about how to employ language technology for lexical semantic change detection under Dr. Barbara McGillivray’s supervision.

Take a look around to find out more!