Two new honorary doctors at Faculty of Languages
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Two linguists of high international repute — Peter Austin, who studies endangered languages, and David Konstan, who has made major contributions in research on Greek history, focusing on emotions — have been named as honorary doctors at the Faculty of Languages, Uppsala University.
Peter Austin holds the Märit Rausing Chair in Field Linguistics and heads the programme for endangered languages at the School of Oriental and African Studies, part of the University of London. His research interests include descriptive, theoretical and applied linguistics. He has, for example, carried out extensive field studies of indigenous peoples’ languages in Australia. Austin has played a crucial international part in drawing attention to endangered languages by emphasising the importance of documenting the human cultural heritage represented by the thousands of languages at risk of vanishing in the near future. His motto that ‘every lost word means yet another lost world’ has boosted schools’ and the public’s interest in endangered languages. Austin began his career in Australia and has since then been a guest professor at several highly regarded universities, including Stanford University, the University of Hong Kong and the Max Planck Institute. He has also been awarded both the prestigious Humboldt Prize and the Humboldt Award.
David Konstan, Professor of Classics at New York University and Professor Emeritus of Classics at Brown University, has made important research contributions in Greek and Latin literature and philosophy, and distinguished himself, in particular, for his groundbreaking research on the history of emotions. David Konstan’s own works have been translated into several languages and he has held academic positions in numerous countries. He is a leader of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and an honorary member of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. With his research, David Konstan has been a pioneering voice in classical philology and philosophy, central to the research produced in Uppsala over the past 15 years. He continues to exert a decisive influence on the projects currently being implemented in the subject of the Greek language.