Ballot Archive

03 Apr 2025

Candidate Details

Candidate Name

Marc Alexander

Academic degrees, honours etc.

MA, MPhil, PhD. Fellow of the Royal Historical Society

Profession or occupation

Professor of English Linguistics

Grounds for election

Marc Alexander is Professor of English Linguistics, University of Glasgow. He is the current director of the Historical Thesaurus of English, the largest thesaurus in the world, and supervised the publication of its second edition in 2020. The Historical Thesaurus aims to map the evolution of language, culture, and society in the English-speaking world, and was awarded a Queen’s Anniversary Prize in 2017. Alexander has been PI or CI on many major funded projects, including Semantic Annotation and Markup for Enhancing Lexical Searches (2014-15), Mapping Metaphor (2012-15) and most recently Our Heritage, Our Stories (2021-24). He was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2019. Alexander also developed The Hansard Corpus 1803-2005 and has published pioneering articles analysing the history of parliamentary discourse. He has produced over 70 publications on the study of words, meaning and effect in English, using texts ranging from detective fiction to astronomical catalogues.

Signatories

The following Fellows have signed this Blue Paper