Professor Sam Wolfe
Sam Wolfe is Professor of French and Romance Linguistics in the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages and the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology, and Phonetics, as well as a Governing Body Fellow of St Catherine’s College. He is currently Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Linguistics Faculty and Director of Schools Liaison and Outreach for the Modern Languages Faculty.
His research focuses on understanding the nature of grammatical variation, acquisition and change, principally in the Romance languages. Within Romance, he works on both standard and non-standard Romance varieties, with particular interests in French, Occitan, Spanish, and the languages of Italy. Recent monographs and edited volumes include Syntactic Change in French (OUP; 2021), Continuity and Variation in Germanic and Romance (OUP 2021) Rethinking Verb Second (OUP; 2020), Variation and Change in Gallo-Romance Grammar (OUP; 2020), and Verb Second in Medieval Romance (OUP; 2018). He is currently writing a major monograph on the internal and external factors driving the grammatical differentiation of the Romance languages from the medieval period to the present day, as part of a project funded by a Philip Leverhulme Prize.
Sam has a sustained interest in school governance, higher-education policy, and social mobility; he has experience as a governor in FE and Sixth-Form Colleges as well as secondary and primary schools. He has also undertaken policy work on the challenges Looked After Children face in accessing Higher Education.
