The College mourns the loss of our colleague Jim Pusack, who passed unexpectedly the night of December 30, 2008. Jim Pusack, Associate Professor of German, was serving as Chair of the department he had been with for 34 years, having first joined The University of Iowa’s German faculty in 1974 as an instructor. He earned his PhD in Germanic Languages from Indiana University in 1977 and both his BA and MA in German from Johns Hopkins University.

Jim was a passionate lover of languages and a founding faculty member of FLARE, Foreign Language Acquisition Research and Education, the interdisciplinary doctoral program in Second Language Acquisition. Beyond teaching curriculum in German language and literature, Jim supervised independent coursework in less commonly taught languages such as Arabic, Indonesian, and Turkish and worked to support Fulbright teaching assistants in those languages. He was devoted to exploring multimedia and technology as tools in second language learning, developing numerous software and video projects and receiving the 2003 ACTFL/FDP-Houghton Mifflin Award for Excellence in Foreign Language Instruction Using Technology—a national award he shared with Sue Otto of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, his close colleague and collaborator to whom he was engaged to be married.

He is also survived by his daughter Elizabeth (Betsy), his daughter’s mother Joanne Shaver, his parents George and Marian Pusack, his brother Bill Pusack, Bill’s wife Priscilla, their two children Tim and Anna, his sister Ann Wilt, and Ann’s husband Nelson. Services will be held Saturday, January 3, at 11 a.m., preceded by a visitation from 9-11 a.m., at Trinity Episcopal Church, 320 E. College Street, Iowa City. In lieu of flowers, the family asks that contributions be made to the Iowa City Shelter House.