Will Ryan obituary (1937-2023)

It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of Will Ryan, after a long struggle with pancreatic cancer. He was Lecturer in Russian Language and Literature at SSEES from 1968 to 1976, where he also served as Editor of the Slavonic and East European Review.

 Will learnt his Russian at Bromley Grammar School for Boys, then in the joint services programme for linguists during his national service in the Royal Navy and finally at Oxford University. He spent a year in Leningrad as a British Council post-graduate student in 1962–63. Will’s postgraduate work led to a DPhil in 1970 on ‘Astronomical and Astrological Terminology in Old Russian Literature’. 

He worked for the Clarendon Press in the 1960s on the Oxford Russian-English dictionary and as assistant curator at the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford. He then moved to SSEES for eight years but the main part of his career was spent at the Warburg Institute, where he was the academic librarian for twenty-six years and professor. 

In 1995 he compiled the Penguin Russian-English-Russian dictionary (with Peter Norman, also of SSEES), and was the author of The Bathhouse at Midnight: An Historic Survey of Magic and Divination (1999) and, with Moshe Taube, The Secret of Secrets: The East Slavic Version (2019). He was one of the leading experts internationally on the history of Russian magic.He became a Fellow of the British Academy in 2000 and was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2007.

 Will is survived by his wife, Janet, his children Masha, Liza, Ben and Izzy and grandson Malek. He is fondly remembered for his wealth of knowledge and sense of fun by his friends at SSEES.

Photo: SSEES in the 1960s. Will Ryan is at the far left of the front row, smoking a pipe. Immediately behind him is Faith Wigzell. László Péter is top left, Richard Freeborn top right, also smoking a pipe. Below Freeborn are Eric Tappe and John Keep.