Special Issue
This is a special issue of the Spell-Out Blog to celebrate two retiring faculty members in our department, Jay Jasanoff and Michael Flier!
At the department’s spring reception on May 1, Kevin, Gennaro and Jim all gave tribute to the immense contributions to the field of linguistics and to our department made by Jay and Michael. In particular we wish to thank them both for their dedicated teaching and mentorship of our students over their many years in the department.
Jay Jasanoff's Retirement
A distinguished scholar and beloved faculty in our department, Professor Jay Jasanoff, is retiring this summer!
Jay Jasanoff received both his B.A. in Linguistics and Mathematics (magna cum laude,1963) and his Ph.D. in Linguistics (1968), from Harvard. He spent a year at UC Berkeley before he returned to Harvard to teach between 1970 and 1978. After teaching at Cornell for another 20 years, during which time he was Chair or Acting Chair of the department for 6 years, he came back to Harvard as the Diebold Professor of Indo-European Linguistics and Philology. He served as Chair of our department for 11 years, and was Interim Chair of the Department of South Asian Studies for two years. Jay was elected as a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America in 2008 and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011.
Over the past 60 years of his intellectual career, Jay has worked intensively on Proto-Indo-European verbal morphology and is famous for the h2e-conjugation theory he developed with evidence from Hittite and Tocharian in his 2003 book Hittite and the Indo-European Verb. He also studied Balto-Slavic accentuation and tried to reconstruct its prehistory.
We congratulate him on his remarkable career and wish him the very best in retirement!
Michael Flier's Retirement
Our faculty Michael Flier, the Oleksandr Potebnja Professor of Ukrainian Philology, is also retiring this summer!
Michael received his B.A. and Ph.D. from UC Berkeley before teaching at Harvard. His research interests are primarily focused on Slavic linguistics and the semiotics of medieval East Slavic culture. He has taught courses for both the Slavic and Linguistics departments throughout his tenure at Harvard. He chaired the Department of Linguistics between 1994 and 1998 and is credited with expanding its faculty! He was also the Director of the Ukrainian Research Institute from 2004-2013.
We congratulate him on his distinguished career and wish him a happy retirement too!
