East Coast Indo-European Conference (ECIEC 45)
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".
Programme
Friday 19 June [Taylor Institution Library]
9.15 Registration
9.45 Welcome address
Panel 1: 10.00am – 11.00am
10.00 Michele Bianconi (Uppsala/Oxford) – A new sound law in Lydian?
10.20 Petra Goedegebuure (Chicago) – Hittite šīyamana- ‘cultic festival’ and kallištarwana- ‘feast, party’
10.40 Sara Kimball (UT Austin) – Lycian hla-, Milyan sla-
11.00am – 11.30am: Tea & Coffee
Panel 2: 11.30am – 12.30pm
11.30 Jay Jasanoff (Harvard) – What are Hitt. wāki and lāki?
12.00 Kazuhiko Yoshida (Kyoto) – The Morphological History of Hittite Verbs in -´e/a- and -ške/a-
12.30pm – 2pm
Lunch break
Panel 3: 2.00pm – 3.00pm
2.00 Timothy G. Barnes (Oxford) – Young Avestan apāθa and the formation of the passive aorist
2.30 Martin Kümmel (Jena) – Pahlavi variants and Middle Persian Umlaut
3.00pm – 3.15pm: Tea & Coffee
Panel 4: 3.15pm – 4.15pm
3.15 Elisabeth Rieken (Marburg) – Cheering and Wailing in Luwian and Elsewhere
3.45 Anthony Yates (UCLA) – The Indo-European denominative statives in Luwian
4.15pm – 4.30pm: Tea & Coffee
Panel 5: 4.30pm – 5.30pm
4.30 Jeremy Rau (Harvard) – Mycenaean Cruces II: the triple reflex of syllabic nasals
5.00 Marina Benedetti (Siena Stranieri) – Diathesis and Voice in Ancient Greek: New Insights from a Historical and Typological Perspective
Saturday 20 June [Taylor Institution Library]
Panel 6: 10.00am – 11.00am
10.00 Ronald Kim (Poznán) – Allomorphic redistribution in Gothic verbal inflection
10.30 Guðrún Þórhallsdóttir (University of Iceland) – Cutting and reining in Icelandic and Faroese
11.00am – 11.30am: Tea & Coffee
Panel 7: 11.30am – 12.30pm
11.30 Stephanie Jamison (UCLA) – Towards a Formal Typology of Ring Composition: The Rig Veda
12.00 Mark Hale (Concordia) – Sandhi Drivers in Kashmir
12.30pm – 2.00pm
Lunch break
Panel 8: 2.00pm – 3.00pm
2.00 Georges-Jean Pinault (EPHE) – Putting an end to the scandal of the nasal infix present
2.30 José Luis García Ramón (Köln) – PIE *bheh2- ‘to shine’ (and some semantic shifts)
3.00pm – 3.15pm: Tea & Coffee
Panel 9: 3.15pm – 4.15pm
3.15 Daniel Kölligan (Würzburg) – The goal bias in diachrony - some case studies
3.45 Zachary Rothstein-Dowden (independent researcher) – OIr. nem, CLuw. tappaš- and the PIE word for ‘heaven’
4.15pm – 4.30pm: Tea & Coffee
Panel 10: 4.30pm – 5.30pm
4.30 Olav Hackstein (Munich) – Insatiable gods and deverbative privatives in Indo-European
5.00 Melanie Malzahn (Vienna) – Again on the origin of Old Indic cvi constructions
Sunday 21 June [Taylor Institution Library & Wolfson College]
Panel 11: 10.30am – 12am [Taylor Institution Library]
10.30 Jared Klein (Georgia) – The System of Adversative Conjunction in Classical Armenian and a New, Philologically-Based Topography of Adversativity
11.00 Birgit Olsen (Copenhagen) – Greco-Armenian morphological correspondences
11.30 Benjamin Fortson (Michigan) – An Armenian deep-sixing operation
12.00pm – 2pm
Lunch break
Panel 12: 2pm – 3.30pm [Wolfson College]
2.00 Stefan Höfler (Vienna) – How (Not) to Articulate Your Adjectives in Old Albanian
2.30 Giulio Imberciadori (Munich) & Alexander Nikolaev (Cyprus) – Slackk: Toch. B slakkare, A slākkär
3.00 Philomen Probert (Oxford) & Jesse Lundquist (Princeton) – How is εὐπάτωρ really accented in Greek…and why?
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).
