Anna Morpurgo Davies

Anna Elbina Morpurgo Davies, DBE, FSA, FBA (21 June 1937 – 27 September 2014) was an Italian philologist who specialised in comparative Indo-European linguistics. She spent her career at Oxford University, where she was the Professor of Comparative Philology.

Anna Elbina Morpurgo was born in Milan, the fourth child of a Jewish family. Her grandfather, Guido Castelnuovo, was a mathematician; her father, Augusto Morpurgo, was dismissed in 1938 under the Fascist racial laws and died the following year after trying to find a way to take his family to Argentina. She and her mother moved to Rome, where they survived with false papers and in hiding.

After the war, she earned her doctorate in classics from the University of Rome with a thesis on Linear B; she published the first lexicon of the language.

In 1961 she became a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University's Center for Hellenic Studies in Rome, where she formed a deep interest in theoretical linguistics; she was later to help establish a chair in the subject at Oxford University. She moved to Oxford in 1962, became a lecturer in Classical Philology in 1964, and spent the remainder of her career there with the exception of guest teaching at various institutions in the United States.

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