E. Wayles Browne is a Professor Emeritus at Cornell University. Browne's research interests include Slavic and general linguistics. His specialty within Slavic is the Serbo-Croatian area (Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian). He has also worked on or taught other South Slavic languages, Polish, Russian and Belarusian, the Balkan language area, Old Church Slavonic, Slavic historical grammar, comparative and contrastive grammar, and pedagogical grammar.

In general linguistics, Browne has done research in syntax, morphology, and phonology, in particular relative and other subordinate clauses, interrogatives, clitic rules, word order, reflexive verbs, accent rules, etc., usually using Slavic material.