Asko Parpola (University of Helsinki)

Asko Parpola has been invited to the Stanford Summer Linguistic Institute as the 2007 Hermann Collitz Professor. He is Professor Emeritus of the University of Helsinki, where he chaired the Department of South Asian and Indo-European Studies 1982-2004. He has been a visiting Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge (1987), Kyoto University (1999) and the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature in Kyoto (2006). His research focuses on a philological and archaeological study of early South Asia, in particular the Vedic religion, the Indus script, and the prehistory of the Indo-Iranian languages.

Asko Parpola is giving the Collitz Lecture on July 17.

Collitz Professorship

In 1945, the Linguistic Society learned that it was the main legatee in the will of Klara H. Collitz, widow of Hermann Collitz, the first President of the Society. The bequest included the Collitz's residence in Baltimore and their extensive library. Mrs. Collitz's will provided that the proceeds of the sale of this property may be used to establish "the Hermann and Klara H. Collitz Professorship for Comparative Philology (i.e. 'eine Professur für vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft')". By vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft, Mrs. Collitz specified, "I mean the term in the sense my husband used it, i.e. including not only Germanic Philology, ancient and modern, but likewise Classical and Oriental Philology, combined with phonetics, folklore, mythology, ethnography, archaeology, dialectology, metrics and subjects related thereto."