Nicholas Justin Allen

Nicholas Justin Allen (8 July 1939 – 21 March 2020) was an English physician and social anthropologist who specialized in Indo-European studies. Allen was Viceregent at Wolfson College, Oxford and Anthropology Editor of the Journal of Indo-European Studies.

Biography Nicholas Allen was born in London, England on 8 July 1939. He descended from a long line of British Army officers and administrators in British India. His father was a civil servant with a strong interest in Celtic studies.

After graduating from Rugby School, Allen received a Classics Scholarship to study at New College, Oxford. He started studying medicine at the University of Oxford in 1957, and received his BM BCh in 1964. Allen subsequently worked at St Mary's Hospital, London for a year. He was strongly influenced by the research of Émile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss, Georges Dumézil and Louis Dumont. Allen was considered one the world's foremost authorities on the comparative study of Indo-European mythology, on which he made significant contributions. He had deep knowledge of both Celtic, Greek, Indian and Roman mythology and literature. Throughout his career, Allen was an editor of several publications, including World Anthropology, the Journal of Hindu Studies, the Journal of Indo-European Studies, and Studia Indo-Europaea. He was the author of seven books, eighty articles and hundreds of scholarly reviews. He was notably Mythology Editor at the Journal of Indo-European Studies for twenty years.

Allen died on 21 March 2020. He was survived by his wife Sheila and two daughters.

Selected works Sketch of Thulung grammar, with three texts and a glossary, Cornell University China-Japan Program, 1975 (Editor with R. Gombrich, T. Raychaudhuri and G. Rizvi) Oxford University Papers on India, OUP, 1986 (Editor with W. S. F. Pickering and W. Watts Miller) On Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Routledge, 1998a (Editor with W. James) Marcel Mauss: A Centenary Tribute, Berghahn, 1998b Categories and Classifications: Maussian Reflections on the Social, Berghhan, 2000 (Editor and Translator) Marcel Mauss: Manual of Ethnography, Berghahn, 2007 (Editor with Hilary Callan, Robin Dunbar and Wendy James) Early Human Kinship: From Sex to Social Reproduction, Blackwell, 2008 Miyapma: Traditional Narratives of the Thulung Rai, Vajra Publications, 2015 Arjuna–Odysseus: Shared Heritage in Indian and Greek Epic, Routledge, 2020