Our warmest congratulations to Somerville alumna Althea Sovani (2018, Classics and Oriental Studies), who has won third prize in the Society for Indo-European Studies international competition for the best Master’s thesis in historical-comparative linguistics.
Althea read Classics and Oriental Studies from 2018, followed by an MPhil in Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics, also at Somerville. Althea dates these years at Somerville as the moment when she transformed a lifelong love of translating Greek and Latin into a vocation, as she learned Sanskrit and immersed herself fully in Indo-European Philology and Greek and Latin Historical Linguistics.
During her undergraduate studies, Althea was awarded a Qatar Thatcher Scholarship in recognition of her academic excellence, and she also won the Gaisford Greek Prose Prize, the Boden Prize, the Comparative Philology Prize, the Craven Prize and the Chancellor’s Latin Verse Prize.
Althea’s MA thesis “The Infinitive in the Atharvaveda: A post-Ṛgvedic Analysis” was announced as the winner of third prize in the Indogermanische Gesellschaft Award 2025 on 10th March 2026 . Her work on the infinitive in the Old Indic Atharvaveda was praised by the jury as an “excellent achievement of a young scholar”.
Today, Althea is reading for a DPhil in Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics co-funded by the AHRC, the Clarendon Fund and Christ Church College. She has presented her work on the development of infinitives at venues including the World Sanskrit Conference in Kathmandu, and has recently begun directing and acting in plays in Ancient Greek and Sanskrit as well as securing election as Vice-President of the Oxford Sanskrit Society.
Althea following her acting performance in the ‘Mattavilāsaprahasana’