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Murray Edwards offers an intellectually vibrant but warm and supportive community which brings out the best in our young women

Degrees and honours

• BA (Modern Languages, Cambridge)
• MA (Cambridge)
• DPhil (Oxford)

Awards and prizes

• 2004 Officier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques
• Prix d’Académie awarded by the French Academy 1997
• Prix Georges Dumézil awarded by the French Academy 2013
• AHRC major award under the Open World Research Initiative, Multilingualism: Empowering Individuals, Transforming Societies (PI, 2016-2021)
• AHRC project Promoting Language Policy (PI, 2021-2022)

Biography

I studied French and German as an undergraduate at Girton College, Cambridge, but soon realised that my true passion was linguistics. After graduating I did a DPhil in Oxford with Professor Rebecca Posner on a key figure in the standardisation of the French language in the seventeenth century, Claude Favre de Vaugelas. Following a year as a Junior Research Fellow at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, I was appointed to an Assistant Lectureship in the French Department in 1983, and have been in Cambridge ever since. In 2005 I became Professor of French Philology and Linguistics and in 2009 I moved to the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics. I have been a Fellow of Murray Edwards since 2001. I have been lucky enough to have had several periods as Visiting Professor in France and the USA, including Pajus Distinguished Visiting Professor, at the University of California, Berkeley in 2012.