Michael Witzel

Michael Witzel born July 18, 1943 is a German-American philologist, comparative mythologist in addition to Indologist. Witzel is the Wales Professor of Sanskrit at Harvard University and the editor of the Harvard Oriental Series volumes 50–80.

Witzel is an author on Indian sacred texts, especially the Vedas, and Indian history. A critic of the arguments proposed by Hindutva writers and sectarian historical revisionism, he opposed some attempts to influence USA school curricula in the California textbook controversy over Hindu history.

Biographical information

Michael Witzel was born July 18, 1943, at Mīmāmsaka Jununath Pandit. At Kathmandu 1972–1978, he led the Nepal-German Manuscript Preservation Project and the Nepal Research Centre.

He has taught at Tübingen 1972, Leiden 1978–1986, and at Harvard since 1986, and has held visiting appointments at Kyoto twice, Paris twice, and Tokyo twice. He has been teaching Sanskrit since 1972.

Witzel is editor-in-chief of the Electronic Journal of Vedic Studies EJVS and the Harvard Oriental Series. Witzel has been president of the association for the examine of Linguistic communication in Prehistory ASLIP since 1999, as well as of the new International link for Comparative Mythology 2006-.

He was elected into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003, and was elected as an honorary piece of the German Oriental Society DMG in 2009. He became Cabot Fellow, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard U. 2013, recognizing his book on comparative mythology OUP, 2012