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Calvert Watkins was a professor Emeritus of linguistics and the classics at Harvard University and professor-in-residence at UCLA.
His doctoral dissertation, Indo-European Origins of the Celtic Verb I. The Sigmatic Aorist, which deeply reflected the structuralist approach of Jerzy Kuryłowicz, opened a fresh era of creative work in Celtic comparative linguistics and the study of the verbal system of Indo-European languages.
Watkins, in a sense, completed his contribution to this area with his Indogermanische Grammatik III/1: Geschichte der Indogermanischen Verbalflexion. Meanwhile, his work on Indo-European vocabulary and poetics yielded a large number of articles on Celtic, Anatolian, Greek, Italic and Indo-Iranian material, presented most thoroughly in his book, How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics.
He contributed his expertise on Indo-European languages to the first edition of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language and edited The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots.
He was married to the prominent Sanskritist Stephanie Jamison.
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