Allen D. Grimshaw

Emeritus Professor Allen D. Grimshaw joined the Department in 1959 as an Instructor; he retired in 1994 after teaching from 1951 onwards (with brief interruptions for military service and for research leaves and sabbaticals). He began his undergraduate work at Purdue (!), holds B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Missouri and a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. During his nearly fifty years of teaching and research he has focused primarily on social conflict and on language in use in social contexts and on interaction of the two phenomena; he has published a number of books and many articles on these and related topics.. Since retirement he has published encyclopedia and handbook articles on riots in the United States, on genocide, and on a variety of topics in sociolinguistics; he is currently engaged in several research and writing projects. He continues to lecture both in the United States and abroad; much of his and his wife Polly's travel involves final destinations where one or more of their grandchildren can be found. He is particularly proud of his past undergraduate and graduate students, of successful fund-raising for the department, and of continuing to walk fifteen to twenty miles each week. He wishes he could be equally successful with new electronic wizardry from VCRs, to scanners, to power point technologies. He will not be able to help you with problems in "eighty-seven and a half way analysis of variance."