Jaan Puhvel: A Remembrance by Miriam Robbins Dexter

Jaan Puhvel was an amazing scholar and mentor. He accepted me into the Indo-European Studies Program in 1967. I had been in a Master’s program in Classics; while I enjoyed the undergraduate program, when I became a graduate student I found that I wanted to focus on ancient texts – not literary criticism of those texts. A year of Sanskrit in my senior undergraduate year whetted my appetite for studying more languages.

So I went to see Professor Puhvel, who at that time was chair of Indo-European Studies—at that time an offshoot of the Classics department. I asked him if I could transfer from Classics to Indo-European Studies, and I told him that my great love was for reading and translating ancient texts. His answer to me was that IES would give me all the languages I could want–and it did!  Professor Puhvel was 36 when I met him and he already read 31 languages!  What a role model! Of course I took Hittite with him my first year in the program and I totally fell in love with the language and the program.  As I was finishing the course work for the PhD, Professor Puhvel told me that he would be my dissertation chair. He suggested that I write my dissertation based on a paper I wrote and rewrote for his myth classes, on Indo-European female figures. That wonderfully changed the course of my life, and I have been writing about ancient female figures for the past forty-eight years!

Professor Puhvel was so generous with his time and his knowledge. I will forever be grateful to him.