2008 Woodie Awards
Remembering Mark R.V. Southern
Middlebury College mourns the loss of a beloved professor
Jason F. Siegel
Issue date: 3/30/06 Section: News
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The Office of the President sent out several messages over the course of the weekend, starting with an all-campus e-mail containing minimal information about the death and announcing that College Chaplain Laurie Jordan '79 and Assistant Professor of Psychology and licensed clinical psychologist Augustus Jordan were on hand in the Chateau Grand Salon to provide emotional support to students, faculty and staff. The College also held a memorial service yesterday afternoon in Mead Chapel.
Popular almost from the instant he arrived on campus, Southern soon achieved near rock-star status among students for his seemingly unlimited depth of knowledge and effervescent personality. He inspired scores of students to declare Independent Scholar majors in linguistics, and he was recently involved in an effort to establish a linguistics minor. He also served as an advisor to many German students and supervised several independent projects, always eager to serve as a second theses reader.
Born in Cambridge, England and a graduate of the prestigious Eton School and both Oxford and Princeton Universities, Southern was a well-respected scholar in historical linguistics, especially among Germanic, Romance and Classic languages. He worked with 26 languages and was able to make connections between Old Norse, Sanskrit and French with little effort. His courses regularly filled to more than twice their initial capacity, as students flocked to his lectures. He often displayed so much energy that he would end a class with chalk and sweat all over his clothes, a trademark that endeared him to his students. Said Edward Hinson '05.5, "Mark's lectures bubbled with excitement even at 8 a.m." Hannah Washington '08 added, "He always seemed excited by every new perspective that students could offer."
As a scholar, his research interests covered all areas of the humanities, including classics, comparative religion and anthropological linguistics. He had recently published a book, "Contagious Couplings: Yiddish shm- and the Contact-Driven Transmission of Expressives," and his "History of the German Language" is also under consideration at Cambridge University Press, which has a series of language histories. One of his many forays outside linguistics, however, was as a judge for the Alison Fraker Prize, for which he had offered his services for the last two years. Chair of the Women's and Gender Studies Program Sujata Moorti said, "Mark was always the first to volunteer to read the essays and was always very meticulous in his assessments of the interdisciplinary array of texts. Undertaking this additional task in his already busy schedule is a striking example of his commitment to fostering an intellectual community."