W. Norman Brown

William Norman Brown (June 24, 1892 – April 22, 1975) was a distinguished Indologist and Sanskritist who established the first academic department of South Asian Studies in North America and organized the American Oriental Society in 1926. He was the Professor of Sanskrit at the University of Pennsylvania for most of his academic career. He was president of the Association for Asian Studies in 1960. He is considered the founder of the field of South Asian Studies, which he pioneered in his career over four decades at the University of Pennsylvania, where he helped to found the Department of Oriental Studies (1931), and later single-handedly founded the Department of South Asia Regional Studies (1948). These departments are now survived by the departments of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, and South Asia Studies. W. Norman Brown also founded the American Institute of Indian Studies, which was located in the Van Pelt Library at the University of Pennsylvania.

W. Norman Brown was born in Baltimore on June 24, 1892, and went to India at the age of eight, as the son of missionary parents. He was sent to a boarding school in Hiram, Ohio, when he was thirteen. His parents came back in 1910 and W. Norman Brown and his father both joined Johns Hopkins University, as an undergraduate and graduate student respectively. His father, George W. Brown, earned a PhD with a thesis on The Human Body in the Upanishads and W. Norman Brown obtained a BA in Greek. He then studied with the Vedic scholar Maurice Bloomfield, and received his PhD in 1916. His doctoral dissertation was published in part in the Journal of the American Oriental Society in 1919, and demonstrated his diachronic interest in South Asia. From 1916 to 1919 he was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, and then returned to Johns Hopkins as the Johnston scholar in Sanskrit. He traveled to India in 1922, first to Varanasi for research, and then to Jammu where he became the professor of English and Vice-Principal at the Prince of Wales College.

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