Freya Abbas

Thesis title: Fallen Tongues: Anglo-Algonquian Linguistic Encounters and the Myth of Babel 

Thesis description: Between 1500 and 1700, over 10,000 new words entered the English language, including numerous foreign loanwords. Many writers expressed concerns about the corruption of English. At the same time, the story of the tower of Babel was believed to be a lamentable historical fact that led to the creation of different languages. Intellectual culture was dominated by a desire to restore the pre-Babel language that must have been spoken by Adam in the garden of Eden. My research is on how English settlers, including the Virginia colonists and New England Puritans, would have been influenced by the story of Babel when they encountered the Algonquian language family. How did their religious beliefs and worldview affect their ability to document languages like Carolina Algonquian, Powhatan, Wampanoag, and Narragansett? My project aims to trace the ideological beginnings of the devaluing of Indigenous languages that later resulted in genocidal policies of language erasure.

Supervisor: Professor Nandini Das

Research interests: Early modern literature, Indigenous studies, linguistics, ecocriticism, theology, intellectual history

Conference papers:

'Language Learning on the Early Modern Colonial Frontier,' Reading the Practical in Early Modern Literature, April 2026, University of Sheffield 

'Bad Language in Jamestown and The Tempest,' Shakespeare After Werstine: Editing Shakespeare Now, May 2025, Western University

'Thomas Harriot's Universal Alphabet,' Scientiae: The Global History of Knowledge, October 2024, Brown University