Awards

Guggenheim Fellow - 1939

About Harold Whitehall

Harold Whitehall joined the faculty at IU Bloomington as an associate professor of English and chairman of the Linguistic Program in the fall of 1941. He was appointed to the faculty of the Graduate School that same year. He became professor of English and chairman of the Department of linguistics in 1949, and professor of linguistics in 1959. During the summer of 1944, he was awarded a Rockefeller Fellowship to do editorial work on the Kenyon Review, a publication of Kenyon College. He was appointed an IU School of Letters Fellow in 1952, was a McGuffey Visiting Professor of English at Ohio University in 1966, and a visiting professor of English language at the University of Puerto Rico in 1960. He retired from IU early in 1966, and later that same year, given the rank of professor emeritus of English and linguistics. The following year, Whitehall began teaching at the University of Ibadan in West Nigeria (1967-1970). Even after his official retirement, he held a position at the University of Liberia in Monrovia.

Whitehall was educated at Hull Technical College in Hull, England, from 1918 to 1924; University College in Nottingham, England, from 1924 to 1928; obtained a B.A. from the University of London in 1927; and a Ph.D. from the State University of Iowa in 1931. He taught English as an instructor at the University of Iowa from 1928 until he received his Ph.D. in 1931. He worked on the Middle English Dictionary as a research associate (1931-1932) and an assistant editor (1932-1938), and was an English instructor at the University of Michigan (1932-1938). He then moved on to the University of Wisconsin as an English lecturer and research associate (1938-1939), was a visiting lecturer in English language at Western Reserve University (1937-1938), and a visiting professor at the University of Texas during the summers (1937-1939).

Whitehall passed away February 25, 1986, in London, England.