Professor Robert Thomson

It is with sadness that the College community has learned of the death of Professor Robert Thomson, Supernumary Fellow of Pembroke.

Professor Thomson came to Oxford as Calouste Gulbenkian Professor of Armenian Studies in 1992 and was elected to a Fellowship of Pembroke which he held until his retirement in 2001.  Having originally studied at Cambridge, Professor Thomson had a distinguished career which included spending some three decades at Harvard University before coming to Oxford, and later being elected to a Fellowship of the British Academy.

An expert in classical Armenian literature, Professor Thomson's body of work in translation and exposition opened up many texts to scholars without the linguistic skills to otherwise access them.  He continued to publish and to lecture into his retirement, and will be much missed by colleagues.