Friday 19 June 2026 to Sunday 21 June 2026
Taylor Institution Library and Wolfson College, Oxford
The conference will be free and open to everyone, but registration will be necessary for everyone except speakers.
Please, register at the following links:
In-person registration | deadline 8 June
Online registration | deadline 15 June
The East Coast Indo-European Conference (ECIEC), which first took place in the form of an “invitational conference” at Yale University in 1982 — attended by luminaries of Indo-European comparative linguistics such as Warren Cowgill, Anna Morpurgo Davies, and Calvert Watkins —, can now look back on a tradition spanning four decades. Since that initial gathering, ECIEC has been held at a variety of universities on the North American East Coast (including, in addition to Yale, Harvard, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Georgia, among others) and has developed into one of the premier annual venues for research on historical-comparative Indo-European linguistics.
During the past decades, ECIEC has also periodically crossed the pond to Europe — primarily via European graduates of American universities —, first in 1991 to the University of Oxford, and more recently in 2025 the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München; other European venues have included the Háskóli Íslands, the Uniwersytet im. Adama Mickiewicza w Poznaniu, and the Universität Wien.
In June 2026, ECIEC is returning to the University of Oxford, which continues a long legacy of scientific research in the field extending back to Max Müller, the first Professor of Comparative Philology, appointed in 1868, and including linguists such as Leonard Palmer and Anna Morpurgo Davies, and philologists in fields tightly connected to Indo-European linguistics, such as M. Monier Williams and J.R.R. Tolkien.
ECIEC 45 will be immediately followed by the 2nd Anatolian Languages and Linguistics Summer School".
Confirmed participants and talks:
Tim Barnes (University of Oxford) – Young Avestan apāθa and the formation of the passive aorist
Marina Benedetti (Università per Stranieri di Siena) – Diathesis and Voice in Ancient Greek: New Insights from a Historical and Typological Perspective
Michele Bianconi (Universitet Uppsala / University of Oxford) – A new sound law in Lydian?
Benjamin Fortson (University of Michigan) – An Armenian deep-sixing operation
José Luis García Ramón (Universität Köln) – PIE *bheh2- 'to shine' (and some semantic shifts)
Petra Goedegebuure (University of Chicago) – Hittite šīyamana- ‘cultic festival’ and kallištarwana- ‘feast, party’
Olav Hackstein (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München)
Mark Hale (Concordia University) – Insatiable gods and deverbative privatives in Indo-European
Stefan Höfler (Universität Wien) – How (Not) to Articulate Your Adjectives in Old Albanian
Giulio Imberciadori (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München) and Alexander Nikolaev (University of Cyprus) – Slackk: Toch. B slakkare, A slākkär
Stephanie Jamison (University of California, Los Angeles) – Towards a Formal Typology of Ring Composition: The Rig Veda
Jay Jasanoff (Harvard University) – What are Hitt. wāki and lāki?
Ronald Kim (Uniwersytet im. Adama Mickiewicza w Poznaniu) – Allomorphic redistribution in Gothic verbal inflection
Sara Kimball (University of Texas, Austin) – Lycian hla-, Milyan sla-
Jared Klein (University of Georgia) – The System of Adversative Conjunction in Classical Armenian and a New, Philologically-Based Topography of Adversativity
Daniel Kölligan (Universität Würzburg) – The goal bias in diachrony - some case studies
Martin Kümmel (Universität Jena) – Pahlavi variants and Middle Persian Umlaut
Melanie Malzahn (Universität Wien) – Again on the origin of Old Indic cvi constructions
Birgit Olsen (University of Copenhagen) – Greco-Armenian morphological correspondences
Georges-Jean Pinault (École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris) – Putting an end to the scandal of the nasal infix present
Philomen Probert (University of Oxford) and Jesse Lundquist (Princeton University) – How is εὐπάτωρ really accented in Greek…and why?
Jeremy Rau (Harvard University) – Mycenaean Cruces II: the triple reflex of syllabic nasals
Elisabeth Rieken (Philipps-Universität Marburg) – Cheering and Wailing in Luwian and Elsewhere
Zachary Rothstein-Dowden (independent scholar) – OIr. nem, CLuw. tappaš- and the PIE word for 'heaven'
Guðrún Thórhallsdóttir (Háskóli Íslands) – Cutting and reining in Icelandic and Faroese
Anthony Yates (University of California, Los Angeles) – The Indo-European denominative statives in Luwian
Kazuiho Yoshida (Kyoto) – The Morphological History of Hittite Verbs in -e/a- and -ške/a-
Programme coming soon
Should you have any questions, feel free to get in touch at eciec45@ling-phil.ox.ac.uk or email directly the organisers Tim Barnes (tim.barnes@classics.ox.ac.uk) and Michele Bianconi (michele.bianconi@ling-phil.ox.ac.uk).
Ancient Anatolia Network , TORCH Networks
