Allison Owens

Allison Owens
Noted subjects	British and European Literature, Linguistics
Current college	Sheffield (2020-)
Pronouns	she/they
Stats	HDWhite • NAQT

Allison Owens is a quizzer and prolific moderator from Shropshire, UK, currently studying for a Masters in Linguistics at Sheffield. Her first tournament was 2022 ACF Fall, and she has since performed well at British Novice 2022 and other UK mirrors. In 2024, Allison was the tournament director for the UK mirror of Planetfall, hosted in Sheffield.

University Career

Allison’s undergraduate degree was in Literature and Linguistics at the University of Sheffield, where she remained to complete a Masters in Linguistics in the 2023-2024 academic year. By training, Allison is a syntactician and works on voice, namely passive and middle, as well as word order. She has worked on both L1 acquisition and historical syntax, and hopes to continue to do so. Her current work combines literary linguistics and generative syntax by investigating the use of V2 in Early Modern Theatre, with a particular focus on the Renaissance playwright Christopher Marlowe. She hopes to pursue a PhD in Linguistics in the near-future.

She joined QuizSoc Sheffield halfway through her second year at University, having attended the Pub Quiz run by Danny Lardner and Ethan Moss. Here, the wide coverage of her undergraduate degree was to her benefit, and she is known to be a great lover of George Eliot, particularly Middlemarch. Though Allison began playing QuizBowl in Spring 2022, her first tournament was not until the Autumn, ACF Fall. She played on a team with Matthew Nail, Charlotte Wright and Matthew Beckett-White. They continued to play for Sheffield at several tournaments in the 2022-2023 season, including British Novice 2022 and C++ in the Spring semester. She has been less active in the 2023-2024 season as a player due to the growth of the society during that time. However, she did participate in the UK Mirror of DMA and WaShBowl. At WaShBowl, she played again with Charlotte Wright, plus Bethany Coombes and Elizabeth McGeown, a team notable for being entirely female. During the 2023-2024 season she has become increasingly involved with “quiz admin”. As noted, they are a prolific moderator - modding at tournaments including Spring Novice 2023 and Late Winter Novice 2024. Additionally, she has written questions for British Novice, ACF Winter and recently joined the writing team for WaShBowl II.

Allison was one of two Officers Without Portfolio for Sheffield Quiz Society in the 2023-2024 academic year, alongside Max Watson. As part of this role, they organised Sheffield’s first Drunk Buzzer Quiz, intended to be similar to those run at other Universities. Allison also took on many of the QuizBowl Officer duties after one of the 2023-2024 committee members left the University. As a result of this, she served as Tournament Director for the UK mirror of Planetfall in Spring 2024, the second tournament to be held in Sheffield in the 2023-2024 season. Her crowning achievement in the admin area is organising a pizza smorgasbord for the tournament moderators.

When she is not quizzing, Allison may be found climbing, training for the Sheffield 10k, or butchering songs at Sheffield University’s Bar One Karaoke. Though she loves Early Modern Drama and George Eliot, her favourite novels include Bridget Jones’s Diary and Ali Hazelwood’s Love Theoretically.