Robert Paul Austerlitz was born in Bucharest, Romania on December 13, 1923. In 1938, Austerlitz came to the United States. When coming to the United States, he earned a Bachelors Degree from the New School for Social Research in 1950. Again in 1950, he received his Masters Degree from Columbia University. Then in 1955, he received his Ph.D. from Columbia as well. Austerlitz then began teaching at Columbia in 1958 as an Assistant Professor of Linguistics and Uralic studies. In 1962, he was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure. Finally in 1965, he was made a Professor at Columbia, and was appointed Chairman of the Department of Linguistics until 1968. In December 1993, he retired from Columbia.
In Austerlitz's fieldwork he studied Gypsy folklore in Hungary. He also visited Alaska, New Mexico and northern Japan to study indigenous, preliterate tongues (Linguist List,1). His biggest research interest was Uralic and Paleo-Siberian languages. Some of his works included Ob-Ugric Metrics, Finnish Reader and Glossary, and he was the editor of The Scope of American Linguistics.
Austerlitz also held two doctorates from the University of Umea in Sweden and the University of Helsinki. He was also elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1991, and a Senior Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 1969, he was awarded the Order of the Lion in Finland by the president of Finland.. He was a member of the Linguistic Society of America, which he became president of in 1990. He was also a member of the American Oriental Society, which he became president of in 1981. He became a member of the Societe Finno-Ougrienne, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and the Society for Finnish Literature. He also became a Visiting Professor at Yale University, University of California at Berkeley, Ohio State University, and the Universities of Washington, Hawaii, Cologne and Helsinki (Linguist List,1). He was known as one of the most popular and entertaining lecturers of his time. One of his most popular is the lecture he gave at Columbia Univeristy in 1987 on the “Biography of Phonetics.” He described phonetics as “a homeless science because it has roots in the natural sciences and the humanities and everything in between.”
In 1953, Austerlitz married Sylvi Nevanlinna. They had two children, Monica and Paul. Sylvi passed away in 1981. On September 9, 1994, Robert Austerlitz died of cancer in Calvary Hospital in the Bronx. At the time of his death, he was 70 years old and lived in the Morningside Heights section of Manhattan with his longtime companion Victoria Salter.
Former link, http://www.columbia.edu/cu/record/record2002.25.html, (September, 2003)
Obituary, http://www.linguistlist.org/issues/5/5-1032.html, (September, 2003)
Written By: Heather Olson, 2003
Edited By: Andy Becker, 2006