Dr Pietro Bortone

Bortone studied Classical, Medieval, and Modern Greek (King’s College London), Linguistic Theory (Oxford), Comparative Philology (Oxford), Scandinavian Studies (UCL), and Greek Philology (Oxford).

Besides teaching for the faculties of Classics and of Modern Languages, he has lectured at numerous universities – in the US, continental Europe, south America, and Africa, and has worked as an etymologist for the Oxford English Dictionary. He has received several scholarships and won fellowships from Princeton, Harvard, Uppsala, Berlin’s Wissenschaftskolleg, Rhodes University, Bucharest’s NEC, and the Onassis Foundation, amongst others.

His areas of interest include: adpositions; explanations for semantic shifts;  links between language and nationality; nationalist discourse; use and implications of the term ‘identity’; and the history and structure of a number of languages (notably Ancient, Hellenistic, Byzantine, and Modern Greek; Romeyka; Turkish; Latin; Scandinavian languages; Romanian).