John Frederick Burrows

Professor of English: University of Newcastle 1976-1989

Appointed the fourth Professor of English at the University of Newcastle in 1976, Burrows acted in this capacity for 13 years retiring in July 1989 to become the Director of the newly established Centre for Literary and Linguistic Computing (CLLC).

During his time as Professor of English, he was Dean of the Faculty of Arts, head of the Department of English, a member of council and Senate, and served on many committees. Burrows held the Commonwealth Fellowship of St. John's College, Cambridge in 1979-80 and returned to the College on sabbatical leave in 1984. In 1988 he was Visiting Research Fellow in the Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh.

Emeritus Professor and Director of the CLLC (1989-2000)

Shortly following his retirement, the title of Emeritus Professor was conferred on Burrows.

With funding from ARC, during the last 10 years of his term as Professor of English, Burrows and his colleagues developed a number of valuable methods of computer-assisted textual analysis. The Centre for Literary and Linguistic Computing was established to allow Burrows and his colleagues to continue the ground-breaking research on the computer assisted analysis of texts.

In 2001 Professor Burrows was awarded the prestigious Busa Award for Outstanding Contributions to the field of humanities computing.

He continues to develop and test the methods of computational stylistics and is an active researcher and collaborator.

Written by Alexis Antonia