Wurm, Stephen Adolphe

• Professor Stephen Wurm AM PhD (Vienna) FAHA FASSA

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.

Austria; Papua New Guinea; Solomon Islands

academic; linguist

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

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