Welcome to my personal website!

Ciao! I’m Valentina. I recently completed my PhD in Indo-European Studies at UCLA, where I worked under the supervision of Prof. Brent Vine and Prof. David Goldstein. My dissertation, entitled Computational approaches to semantic change: the case of Christian Latin, investigates lexical semantic change in Latin in the context of the spread of Christianity, combining computational methods, including static and contextual word embeddings, with close philological analysis to examine how the usage and meaning of selected lexical items changed over time.

From November 2026, I will be an FWO Junior Postdoctoral Fellow at Ghent University, working with Prof. Anne Breitbarth, Prof. Steven Vanderputten, and Prof. Els Lefever on the project Measuring syntactic variation in the Latin of the Long Tenth Century: expanding the toolkit for computational syntactic (dia)lectometry. My research investigates syntactic variation in hagiographical texts from long-tenth-century Lotharingia by developing and applying computational dialectometric methods to corpus data.

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-based approaches to lexical semantic change detection.

More broadly, my research interests centre on linguistic variation and change in Latin and other Indo-European languages. I am especially interested in the integration of quantitative, statistical, computational, and corpus-based methods into historical linguistics, as well as in questions of contact and variation. I also have a longstanding interest in the Celtic languages, particularly Old Irish–Latin contact and Insular Celtic more generally, including questions of syntax.

Before my PhD at UCLA, I earned an MPhil in Classics from the University of Cambridge, where I specialised 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!