 at the College of William & Mary, and his PhD at Harvard University before being hired to teach at Yale University.A medieval philologist, Boswell read or spoke seventeen languages, including Catalan, German, French, Old Church Slavonic, Ancient Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Akkadian, Armenian and Latin.Boswell received his doctorate 1975 and joined the Yale University history faculty, where his colleagues included John Morton Blum, David Brion Davis, Jaroslav Pelikan, Peter Gay, Hanna Holborn Gray, Michael Howard, Donald Kagan, Howard R. Lamar, Jonathan Spence, and Robin Winks.