Russell Schuh, M.A. '68, Ph.D. '72

Distinguished Professor of Linguistics Russell Schuh passed away on Nov. 8, 2016. Schuh was a beloved colleague and outstanding member of the linguistics department in teaching, research and service. He was an renowned field linguist, specializing in the Chadic languages of Northern Nigeria, and undertook many field expeditions to Nigeria that led to multiple books and journal articles, documenting languages hitherto hardly studied. Schuh's theoretical work opened new insights into the typology of tone rules and his work on sung metrics broke new ground by its close examination of quantitative meter in living languages. He was an educational innovator, teaching the large Linguistics 1 course at UCLA for many years. Schuh also invented new courses for the linguistics program and devised important teaching materials both for Hausa and Linguistics instruction. He additionally served as a devoted chair of two departments: Linguistics in the 1990's, and later as the last chair of Applied Linguistics.