Obituary

Oliver William Wolters, Goldwin Smith Professor of Southeast Asian History emeritus, died Dec. 5 in Ithaca. He was 85.

Wolters was born in Reading, England, in 1915, received his B.A. from Lincoln College, Oxford University, in 1937 and his Ph.D. from the University of London in 1961. He was in the Malayan Civil Service from 1937 to 1957, when he became a lecturer in Southeast Asian history at the School of Oriental and African Studies in the University of London. He began teaching at Cornell in 1963.

His doctoral dissertation, Early Indonesian Studies and the Origins of Srivijaya, was published by the Cornell University Press in 1967. Wolters' teaching and research spanned early Southeast Asia. His first focus was Indonesia, and his Fall of Srivijaya in Malay History was published in 1970. While he maintained interest in early Indonesia, Wolters embarked upon research concerning ancient Cambodia and Vietnam in the 13th and 14th centuries. In 1982, he wrote a general survey of the region first published in Singapore as the History, Culture and Region in Southeast Asia Perspectives. The survey was republished in 1999 by Cornell's Southeast Asia Program with a postscript longer than the original text. In 1988, Wolters' Two Essays on Dai-Viet in the Fourteenth Century was published by the Yale Southeast Studies Council. In the final years of his life he was experimenting with a dialogue narrative set in 14th century Vietnam.

Wolters was a recipient of the Distinguished Scholarship Award of the Association of Asian Studies in 1990, the group's most prestigious honor. He chaired the Department of Asian Studies at Cornell from 1970 to 1972, was senior editor of the Vietnam Forum from 1985 to 1995, a trustee of the Breezewood Foundation, Md., from 1964 to 1984, a 1972-73 Guggenheim Fellow and a 1982 Bellagio Fellow of the Rockefeller Foundation. He was a visiting fellow of the Australian National University, Canberra, in 1984. He also accompanied several archaeological expeditions to southern Sumatra and taught in China in 1985.

He is survived by his wife, Euteen Wolters; daughter Pamela Gwyneth Gillespie of Cortland, N.Y.; and son Nigel Christopher Wolters of Seattle.