Thomas Field Named Lipitz Professor of the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences

I am pleased to announce that Thomas Field, professor of Modern Languages, Linguistic, and Intercultural Communication, has been named the Lipitz Professor of the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences for Academic Year 2009-10. This professorship is supported by an endowment
created by Roger C. Lipitz and the Lipitz Family Foundation “to recognize and support innovative and distinguished teaching and research in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Maryland Baltimore County.”
Professor Field has achieved an extraordinary record as a teacher, scholar and citizen of the University since joining the UMBC faculty in 1979. In addition to serving on innumerable important committees, he has been chair of his department (1992-1996) and director of the Center for the Humanities (1999-2005 ). A superb teacher of French and linguistics, professor Field was UMBC Presidential Teaching Professor (1992-95) and Carnegie Foundation Maryland Professor of the Year (1996), and in 1982 he shared the Gilbert Chinard Pedagogical Prize given by the American Association of Teachers of French. Professor Field’s research focuses on Gascon/Occitan, an endangered language of southwestern France and the Pyrenees area of Spain, French sociolinguistics, historical perspectives on literacy, and issues in language education. He is author of two books and more than two dozen articles, and his research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Commission and the American Council of Learned Societies. He has held a Fulbright Senior Scholar Research Fellowship and, most recently, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship that supported his ongoing research on Gascon. During the period of his Lipitz Professorship, he will continue his current research project of creating an electronic corpus of Medieval Gascon .
I know that everyone will join me in congratulating Professor Field on his many accomplishments and on being named the Lipitz Professor of the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences for Academic Year 2009/10.
John Jeffries
Dean of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences