Surrey language expert elected to British Academy Fellowship

Professor Matthew Baerman has been elected to the Fellowship of the British Academy for his contribution to the humanities and social sciences.

Professor Matthew Baerman

Professor Baerman’s research focuses on inflectional morphology – the study of how words change form to express grammatical features such as number, tense, or case, with an eye towards unusual theoretical challenges, and how these might refine our view of how language is constructed. His work draws on cross-linguistic comparison, fieldwork, historical (diachronic) reconstruction and computational modelling to explore how and why these patterns emerge.

Professor Baerman is currently part of an international team leading a £8.3 million European Research Council-funded Synergy project, which investigates how the highly complex West Nilotic languages of East Africa organise grammatical information. These languages offer a rare opportunity to study how such intricate systems develop, and Matthew and the Surrey Morphology Group's work will be key to understanding their structure and evolution.

I’m honoured to be elected a Fellow of the British Academy. This recognition wouldn’t have been possible without the support of my colleagues, for which I’m deeply grateful. My work can seem abstract, but the different shapes that morphological systems can take on may tell us something fundamental about how the human mind organises information. Professor Matthew Baerman, Professorial Research Fellow (SMG)

I am delighted that Matthew has received this prestigious recognition from the British Academy. As an inspiring academic whose work exemplifies the value of Humanities research, he will be an excellent ambassador for his field and for the University of Surrey. Professor Patricia Pulham, Head of the School of Arts, Humanities and Creative Industries, Professor of Victorian Literature

In 2025, 58 UK Fellows, 30 International Fellows and 4 Honorary Fellows were elected to the Academy Fellowship.

Founded in 1902, the British Academy is the UK’s national academy for the humanities and social sciences. It is a Fellowship consisting of over 1,800 world-leading leading scholars in these subjects from the UK and overseas. Current Fellows include the classicist Professor Dame Mary Beard, the historian and China expert Professor Rana Mitter and philosopher Professor Baroness Onora O’Neill, while previous Fellows include Dame Frances Yates, Sir Winston Churchill, Seamus Heaney and Beatrice Webb. The Academy is also a funder of both national and international research, as well as a forum for debate and public engagement.

One of my first acts as the incoming President of the British Academy is to welcome this year’s newly elected Fellows. What a line-up! With specialisms ranging from the neuroscience of memory to the power of music and the structural causes of poverty, they represent the very best of the humanities and social sciences. They bring years of experience, evidence-based arguments and innovative thinking to the profound challenges of our age: managing the economy, enabling democracy, and securing the quality of human life.

This year, we have increased the number of new Fellows by nearly ten percent to cover some spaces between disciplines. Champions of research excellence, every new Fellow enlarges our capacity to interpret the past, understand the present, and shape resilient, sustainable futures. It is a privilege to extend my warmest congratulations to them all. President of the British Academy Professor Susan J Smith

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