Partee Elected to British Academy

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Barbara Partee, Distinguished Professor emerita of linguistics and philosophy, has been elected to the British Academy. She is one of only 20 corresponding fellows elected from universities outside of the U.K.

According to the announcement of the selection, “These new fellows of the British Academy join a community of over 1,400 of the leading minds that make up the U.K.’s national academy for the humanities and social sciences. Current fellows include the classicist Dame Mary Beard, the historian Sir Simon Schama and philosopher Baroness Onora O’Neill, while previous fellows include Sir Winston Churchill, C.S Lewis, Seamus Heaney and Beatrice Webb.”

A pioneer in the field of semantics, Partee was in the first class of linguistics Ph.D. students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she studied with the legendary linguist Noam Chomsky.

In 1972, Partee became one of the first faculty members of the newly formed UMass Amherst department of linguistics, at the time one of the first departments in the country to be dedicated to the study of formal linguistic theory. She served as head of the department from 1987-93.

She retired in 2004, but continues to teach part-time. Her influence in this domain of linguistics continues.

In January, Partee was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Amsterdam for her contribution to the development of formal semantics in natural language.

She was awarded an honorary doctor of humane letters by the University of Chicago in 2014.