Shoni Lavie-Driver

My doctoral research examines language and society in Roman Judaea-Palestine, examining in most detail the two largest cities, Caesarea and Jerusalem. Who spoke which languages, in what situations, and what did they think and feel about them? How did language interact with a kaleidoscope of religious and ethnic identities, and how did this vary over time and place? My work combines diverse forms of evidence to produce a holistic picture: authors writing in Greek such as Eusebius and Procopius are taken alongside rabbinic works in Hebrew and Aramaic, and I give full treatment to the wide, multilingual epigraphic corpus. I am supervised by Professor James Clackson in the Classics Faculty at Cambridge. I study at Jesus College, Cambridge, where I also completed my BA and MPhil degrees in Classics. For my MPhil, funded by the John Killen studentship, I focused on the language of the late antique Latin translations of Josephus. In my thesis I investigated devices to express futurity and modality in the sixth century Cassiodoran translation of the Jewish Antiquities.