W. Tecumseh Fitch

Who is W. Tecumseh Fitch?

William Tecumseh Sherman Fitch III is an American evolutionary biologist and cognitive scientist, and at the University of Vienna, where he is co-founder of the Department of Cognitive Biology.

He studies the biology and evolution of cognition and communication, both in humans and other animals, and in particular the evolution of speech, language and music. In doing so, he concentrates on comparative approaches as advocated by Charles Darwin, i.e. the study of homologous and analogous structures and processes in a wide range of species.

Fitch was born in Boston and received both his B.A. in biology and his Ph.D. in Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences from Brown University. From 1996-2000, he worked as a Postdoctoral fellow at MIT and Harvard University. He previously was a lecturer at Harvard University and a reader at the University of St Andrews, before moving to a professorship at the University of Vienna in 2009.

He bears the name of his great-great-great-grandfather, William Tecumseh Sherman, as did his father and grandfather before him.