Remembering Dell Hymes 1927-2009

November 30, 2009 - A brilliant anthropologist, linguist, and folklorist, Dell Hathaway Hymes joined Penn as a professor of anthropology in 1965 and served as dean of the Graduate School of Education from 1975-1987. After his tenure at GSE, Dr. Hymes moved to Virginia and took up a joint appointment of anthropology and English at the University of Virginia, where he remained until his retirement in 1998.

For more than five decades, Dr. Hymes worked at the intersection of linguistics and anthropology, studying its mutual interactions with culture and society. As an undergraduate student, he conducted field research at Warm Springs Reservation in Oregon and began a lifelong relationship with the Wasco and other tribes. He taught courses in linguistic anthropology and in American Indian mythology and poetry and launched the educational linguistics program at GSE. In addition to teaching, Dr. Hymes published several books, including Language in Culture and Society.

Dr. Hymes brought his prodigious scholarship and politics of advocacy to bear on education, and to Penn GSE in particular. He is remembered by GSE colleagues as a strong leader and scholar. Penn GSE Professor Nancy Hornberger explains, "He not only rescued the school from imminent closure, in no small measure by the sheer power of his own scholarly stature, but he also infused it with particular and groundbreaking strengths in the anthropology of education and educational linguistics, strengths which endure to the present." The Ethnography in Education Research Forum, established under his leadership, marked its 30th anniversary in 2009.

Dr. Hymes leaves behind an inspirational legacy in the study of language and inequality, sociolinguistics, and Native American ethnopoetics. Dr. Hornberger adds, "Our sadness at his passing is accompanied by profound gratitude for his life and the power and poetry of his prose."

On December 5, during its annual meeting in Philadelphia, the American Anthropological Association will hold a memorial gathering from 7:30 to 9:30 p.m. in the ballroom of the Courtyard Marriott, 21 N. Juniper Street.