Professor Andreas Willi FBA

Andreas Willi  studied Classics, Slavonic Languages and Literatures and Historical-Comparative Linguistics at the Universities of Basel, Lausanne, and Fribourg in Switzerland as well as at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. After writing his doctoral thesis on sociolinguistic variation in Ancient Greek at the University of Oxford, he worked as Oberassistent in Classics (Latin and Greek Philology) at the University of Basel, before becoming a member of the Swiss Institute at Rome and then moving back to Oxford in 2005 to take up the Diebold Chair of Comparative Philology. In 2020 he was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy.

Andreas Willi has worked extensively on sociolinguistic and dialectal variation in Ancient Greek, on language contact and the language-literature-culture interface in the ancient world, with a special focus on Sicily, and also on Classical (Greek and Latin) literature. At present one of his main interests on the linguistic side is the history and prehistory of the Greek (and Indo-European) verbal system, in particular the development of tense-aspect categories both from a formal (reconstructive) and a functional (philological) point of view. This focus is supplemented by — mainly morphological and etymological — work on other ancient Indo-European languages, especially those of Italy (Latin, Sabellic).