Alan Nussbaum

Who is Alan Nussbaum?

Alan Jeffrey "Jerry" Nussbaum is an American Indo-European linguist and classical philologist, best known for his work on the language of the Homeric epics and the nominals of the IE languages and of reconstructed Proto-Indo-European — especially their derivational semantics and morphology. He teaches Indo-European linguistics and the Greek and Latin languages at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

Nussbaum, of Galician Jewish background, was born in New York City and raised in Passaic, New Jersey. He received a bachelor's degree in classics from Washington Square College, a Diploma in Comparative Philology from the University of Oxford and a Ph.D. in linguistics from Harvard University. After teaching as an instructor, assistant professor and associate professor at Yale University, he moved to Cornell as an associate professor and then full professor of classics and linguistics.