The position of Diebold Professor of Comparative Philology (designated the Professor of Comparative Philology 1868–82 and 1925–2003, and known as the Corpus Christi Professor of Comparative Philology 1882–1925) is a professorship in comparative philology at the University of Oxford. The professor's duties are "to lecture and give instruction in Indo-European and the history and comparative philology of the Indo-European languages."[1]
The professorship was created for the German academic Max Müller in 1868.[2] It was called the "Corpus Christi" Professorship because a commission in 1877, led by Roundell Palmer, 1st Earl of Selborne, recommended that the richest colleges should help the university by providing funds for chairs. Corpus Christi College was reluctant – partly because of the cost involved at a time when the college's income was affected by an agricultural recession, but also because the fellows of the college feared that they would be outvoted by professors.[3] Although the chair was renamed as the Corpus Christi professorship in 1882 on the basis that provision had been made to endow the chair out of the college's revenues,[4] the college never provided sufficient funds to establish a full endowment for the chair, and its obligation to do so (to the college's relief) was removed in 1925.[3] The chair was renamed in 2003 after Professor A. Richard Diebold Jr., to mark his donation to the university to support the chair.[5] It is now associated with a fellowship of Worcester College, although Anna Morpurgo Davies (appointed in 1971) was a fellow of Somerville College instead because at that time Worcester did not have women fellows.[6]
Muller was invoked but never defined (see the help page).Romance was invoked but never defined (see the help page).