Robert Fowkes

Who was Robert Fowkes?

Dr. Robert Allen Fowkes was a noted American linguist, specializing in Indo-European Historical Linguistics and philology.

Robert Fowkes was born in Harrison, New York. He received his B.A. in 1934 from New York University, with majors in German and Latin, and his M.A. from NYU a year later. He held a fellowship at the University of Bonn. He received his Ph.D. in 1947 from Columbia University. Fowkes began teaching at NYU in 1938 as an instructor in German. He later became head of the German Department. He retired from NYU in 1978, but continued as Professor Emeritus, lecturing on Avestan, Old Irish, Gothic, Hittite, and other languages, until the 1990s. He also held a Guggenheim Fellowship in Welsh. During World War II he supervised technical research in German, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian and Japanese. Later, at NYU he taught Yiddish, Gothic, Old Saxon, Frisian, Old Norse, Scandinavian, Sanskrit as well as German. He was visiting professor of Celtic languages at Columbia University in 1947.

His major book was Gothic Etymological Studies.