David Willis (linguist)
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David Willis | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | David W. E. Willis |
| Occupation(s) | Linguist and academic |
| Title | Jesus Professor of Celtic |
| Academic background | |
| Thesis | The loss of verb-second in Welsh: Study of syntactic change (1996) |
| Doctoral advisor | Ellis Evans |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | Celtic languages and linguistics |
| Institutions | Somerville College, Oxford University of Manchester Selwyn College, Cambridge Jesus College, Oxford |
| Main interests | language change and syntax |
| Notable works | The history of negation in the languages of Europe and the Mediterranean |
David W. E. Willis is a linguist and Celticist. In 2020 he took up the post of Jesus Professor of Celtic at the University of Oxford.[1] He had previously held posts in historical linguistics at the University of Manchester[2] and at the University of Cambridge, where he was a Fellow of Selwyn College.[3]
He was a Junior Research Fellow at Somerville College, Oxford. In 2022, he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA), the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and social sciences.[4]
Willis completed a BA in Russian and German and an MPhil in General Linguistics at St John's College, Oxford before transferring to Jesus College for his DPhil on the history of word order in the Welsh language, completed in 1996.[5] Ellis Evans, one of Willis's predecessors in the Jesus Chair of Celtic, served as his doctoral supervisor.[6]
