Sophie Whittle

Dr. Sophie Whittle is a Research Fellow at the Digital Humanities Institute (DHI) within the School of History, Philosophy and Digital Humanities at the University of Sheffield. She develops the DHI's strategic research theme in Machine-Assisted Scholarly Editing and serves as Research Associate for the C21 Editions Project, creating digital teaching editions of Geoffrey Chaucer's works.

She holds a PhD in historical linguistics from the University of Sheffield, where her dissertation examined verb second phenomena in Middle English through quantitative corpus analysis and textual studies of dialect, provenance, and genre. Her research spans historical syntax, language acquisition, and sociolinguistic change driven by language contact.

Sophie actively engages in anti-racist pedagogy through the Linguistic Association of Great Britain's racial justice sub-committee and coordinates global workshops on postcolonial pragmatics and human rights. Her work extends to feminist digital archiving via the Sheffield Feminist Archive and the 'Women in Lockdown' pandemic project, which documents women's experiences through oral histories and creative submissions.

She teaches modules in English language history, historical pragmatics, research methods, and syntax, while contributing to interdisciplinary curriculum development focused on decolonizing linguistic education and centering marginalized voices.