FACULTY
Calvert WatkinsVictor S. Thomas Professorof Linguistics and of the Classics, Emeritus watkins(at)fas.harvard.edu |
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Calvert Watkins is now Professor-in-Residence, Department of Classics and Program in Indo-European Studies, UCLA. He lives in Los Angeles. He is interested in the Linguistics
and the Poetics of all the earlier Indo-European languges and
societies, particularly Greek, Latin and Italic, Celtic, especially
Early Irish, Anatolian, especially Hittite and Luvian, Vedic Indic,
and Old Iranian; historical linguistic theory and method; and
Indo-European genetic comparative literature.
His most recent book, which treats all these interests, is How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics (Oxford University Press, New York, 1995, paperback, 2000), awarded the Goodwin Prize, APA 1998. Others of his books and contributions are Indo-European Origins of the Celtic Verb I. The Sigmatic Aorist (Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1962); Indogermanische Grammatik III/1. Geschichte der Indogermanischen Verbalflexion (Carl Winter Verlag, Heidelberg, 1969); The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots (Houghton-Mifflin, Boston, 1985, 2nd revised edition, 2000), revised and abridged in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Third Revised Edition. Appendix: Indo-European Roots (Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1992, 4th revised edition, 2000); editor, Studies in Memory of Warren Cowgill (1929-1985) (de Gruyter, Berlin, 1987); author, "Historical linguistics and culture history", "Indo-European languages", and "Stylistic reconstruction" in the Oxford International Encyclopedia of Linguistics (Oxford University Press, 1992, 2nd ed. 2002), and "Hittite", in the Cambridge Enclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages (Cambridge University Press, 2004). He has also written over 150 articles and reviews, 53 of which are reprinted in the two volumes of his Selected Writings, edited by Lisi Oliver (Innsbrucker Beiträge zur Sprachwissenschaft, Innsbruck, 1994), ranging from "Indo-European metrics and Archaic Irish verse" to "The language of the Trojans". He served as president of the Linguistic Society of America in 1988, and as chair of Harvard's Department of Linguistics for 11 years, most recently 1985-1991. He is an Honorary Member of the Royal Irish Academy (1968), a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1973), a Member of the American Philosophical Society (1975), a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy (1987), and of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, Correspondant Etranger (1990), Associé Etranger, Membre de l'Institut (1999). He was recently honored by the presentation of Mír Curad, Studies in Honor of Calvert Watkins, edd. J. Jasanoff, H.C. Melchert, and L. Oliver (IBS, Innsbruck, 1998), with some 63 contributors. He gave the Gaisford Lecture by invitation of the Faculty of Classics of the University of Oxford in May 2000. His
present projects explore connections between Anatolia and
Greece, the subject of the Gaisford Lecture (published as "L'Anatolie et la Grèce: résonances culturelles, linguistiques et poétiques") and other recent and forthcoming studies, including "A distant Anatolian echo in Pindar: the origin of the Aegis again", "EPEON THESIS. Poetic grammar: word order and metrical structure in The Odes of Pindar", "Homer and Hittite Revisited II", "Some Indo-European logs", "Pindar's Rigveda", "An Indo-European stylistic figure in Hittite", "The third donkey: Origin legends and some hidden Indo-European themes", "The Erbessos blues, and other tales of the semantics of case and the semantics of love among the Western Greeks", and "'Hermit crabs', or new wine in old bottles. Anatolian and Hellenic connections from Homer and before to Antiochus I of Commagene and after". |
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