CLAS mourns the passing of Bill Davies, Professor of Linguistics

August 21, 2017

William D. Davies, professor of linguistics and longtime chair of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Iowa, died on Friday, August 18, 2017, after a prolonged illness. He was 63.

College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Executive Associate Dean Raúl Curto said Davies was an outstanding scholar and a beloved friend and colleague.

"Bill was the ultimate triple threat, a faculty member who excels in all three areas of teaching, research, and service," Curto said. "More importantly, Bill was a superb human being, someone we will all remember as a role model to follow. His passing is a terrible loss for the UI, for CLAS, and for the discipline of linguistics."

Memorial service arrangements are pending with Lensing Funeral & Cremation Service, Iowa City. The CLAS website will carry information when it becomes available. 

Davies received the BA in 1975 from Duke University, and the MA (1979) and PhD (1981) in linguistics from University of California, San Diego. His primary areas of research were syntactic theory and Austronesian linguistics (particularly the languages of Indonesia). He published three books, three edited volumes, and some 60 articles and book chapters, largely on the morphology and syntax of various languages, including Balinese, Basque, Choctaw, English, Fula, Javanese, Madurese, Sundanese, and Telugu. He was an associate editor of Oceanic Linguistics and of Language, Journal of the Linguistic Society of America.

Davies, who was named Collegiate Fellow of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences in 2007 and won the Collegiate Teaching Award in 1989-1990, was a prolific researcher. He compiled "Madurese Storytellers," a digital collection of the folk tales of the Madurese people, the third largest ethnic population in Indonesia. The videos of native storytellers performing traditional and historical narratives are accompanied by four different kinds of written texts: the original Madurese, English, and Indonesian translations, and an interlinear format that includes morpheme-by-morpheme glosses, the common format for linguistic analysis.

In 2016, Davies received a $300,000 grant from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Documenting Endangered Languages program to document the language of the Baduy of Indonesia.