George W. Grace

Who is George W. Grace?

George W. Grace, born on 8 September 1921 in Corinth, Mississippi and raised on the Gulf Coast, is an emeritus professor of linguistics at the University of Hawaiʻi specializing in historical and comparative linguistics, ethnolinguistics, and Austronesian languages, especially the Oceanic languages of Melanesia. He joined the Department of Linguistics in 1964, serving three years as chair and three decades as editor of Oceanic Linguistics, a journal he founded while teaching anthropology at Southern Illinois University.

After service with the United States Army Air Corps, he remained in Europe to earn his first university degree, a licence in political science from the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva in 1948. He then accepted a position as a junior research anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley, where he did fieldwork in 1951 on the Luiseño language, collaborating with Alfred L. Kroeber on The Sparkman Grammar of Luiseño. In 1953–1955 he was a research associate for the Tri-Institutional Pacific Program and then for Yale University conducting research in Austronesian linguistics.