John Boswell - Biography

Biography

Born in Boston in 1947 into a military family, Boswell earned his undergraduate degree from the College of William and Mary, where he converted to Roman Catholicism. A gifted medieval philologist, he worked in, among other languages, Catalan, Old Church Slavonic, Ancient Greek, Arabic, and Latin. Boswell received his doctorate from Harvard University in 1975 and joined the Yale University history faculty, where his colleagues included John Morton Blum, David Brion Davis, Jaroslav Pelikan, John Demos, Peter Gay, Hanna Holborn Gray, Michael Howard, Donald Kagan, Howard R. Lamar, Edmund S. Morgan, Jonathan Spence, Robin W. Winks, and C. Vann Woodward. Boswell was made full professor in 1982. In 1987, Boswell helped organize and found the Lesbian and Gay Studies Center at Yale, which is now the Research Fund for Lesbian and Gay Studies. He was named the A. Whitney Griswold Professor of History in 1990, when he was also appointed to a two-year term as chair of the Yale history department. Boswell was a gifted and devoted teacher. His undergraduate lectures in medieval history were renowned for their organization, erudition, and wit, with the course often making the "top 10" for highest enrollment. To enhance the novelty and high interest in his classes, the multi-talented Boswell would often pen his comments on student papers in perfectly executed italic script.