Wurm, Stephen Adolphe

Identity area

Type of entity

Person

Authorized form of name

Wurm, Stephen Adolphe

Parallel form(s) of name

Standardized form(s) of name according to other rules

Other form(s) of name

  • Professor Stephen Wurm AM PhD (Vienna) FAHA FASSA

Identifiers for corporate bodies

Description area

Dates of existence

1922 - 2001

History

Stephen Adolphe Wurm was born in Budapest, Hungary on 19 August 1922. Wurm completed his PhD in 1944 at the Oriental Institute of the University of Vienna in Turkic Languages and Anthropology. He was a lecturer in Altaic linguistics at the University of Vienna until 1951 then accepted a position in London to help set up the Central Asian Research Institute. In 1954 Wurm accepted a research fellowship in Oceanic Linguistics in the Anthropology Department of Sydney University and in 1957 accepted an appointment as Senior Fellow in Linguistics at the Australian National University. In 1961 he was a foundation member of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies and became Chairman of the Linguistics Committee. In 1967 he was the first elected president of the Linguistic Society of Australia and the Australian representative on the UNESCO Comite International Permanent de Linguistes. When the new Department of Linguistics was established at the Research School of Pacific Studies, Wurm was appointed its first Professor and Head of Department. He retired in 1987 but remained actively involved in the field of linguistics right up until his death on 24 October 2001 in Canberra.

Places

Austria; Papua New Guinea; Solomon Islands

Legal status

Functions, occupations and activities

academic; linguist

Mandates/sources of authority

Internal structures/genealogy

General context

Relationships area

Related entity

Groger-Wurm, Helen (1921- 2005)

Identifier of the related entity

Category of the relationship

family

Dates of the relationship

Description of relationship

spouse

Related entity

ANU Department of Linguistics (1968 -)

Identifier of the related entity

Category of the relationship

Associated with

Dates of the relationship

1957 - 1987

Description of relationship

Senior Fellow 1957; Founding Professor and Head of Department 1968

Access points area

Subject access points

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Occupations

Control area

Authority record identifier

Institution identifier

Rules and/or conventions used

Status

Level of detail

Dates of creation, revision and deletion

Prepared by Maggie Shapley on 7 Mar 2007; revised on 5 June 2012

Language(s)

Script(s)

Sources

Who's Who in Australia 1999
www.humanities.org.au/Fellows/Obituaries/Obituaries2001/PDFs/Wurm.pdf (accessed on 7 May 2007)

Maintenance notes

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