Humanities Development Spotlight:

Creating New Knowledge

Professor Emerita Ilse Lehiste is a pioneer in every sense of the word. She firmly believes that the purpose of a university is the creation of new knowledge, and is one of the charter donors who created an endowment benefiting outstanding faculty through the new Distinguished Linguistic Professorship Fund.

After leaving her native Estonia in 1944, she earned doctoral degrees from the University of Hamburg and the University of Michigan and taught in a number of schools in the United States before coming to Ohio State in 1963 as an associate professor of Slavic. In 1965 she became the founding chair of the Department of Linguistics, from which she retired in 1987. During her tenure, she helped to bring the department to a position of international prominence that it retains today. A distinguished educator and researcher herself, Lehiste has contributed greatly to several fields - most notably linguistics, acoustic phonetics, Slavic and Finno-Ugric studies, and poetics. She is considered to be one of the founders of acoustic phonetics, and her pioneering studies of pitch, duration, and intensity in numerous languages have brought her international renown as one of the world's great phoneticians.

In the last 25 years, she has been honored four times with honorary doctorate degrees, received the Order of the Yugoslav Flag with Golden Wreath for distinguished contributions to the study of the Serbo-Croatian language, and been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a past president of the Linguistic Society of America, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a foreign member of the Finnish Academy of Sciences in addition to membership in numerous other scholarly organizations throughout the world. She has also held two Guggenheim Fellowships and visiting professorships around the world.

Now in her eighties, Lehiste continues her outstanding scholarship, writing articles and giving invited lectures at international conferences (her current research explores the relationship between the metrical structure of poetry and the rhythms of speech). She also remains active in the Department of Linguistics, attending students' weekly group sessions and providing counsel when needed. The College is very grateful for the many ways in which she provides support.