Twaddell, William Freeman

W(illiam) Freeman Twaddell (1906-1982), professor of German and linguistics, was born in Rye, New York, on March 22, 1906. He spent his early life in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Georgia, and North Carolina, moving about as his father, an organist and choir director, relocated. He graduated from Duke University in 1926, and received his master’s degree in 1927 and his doctorate in 1930, both from Harvard. From 1929 to 1946 he taught at the University of Wisconsin, where he was chairman of the German Department from 1937 to 1946 and also of the Division of the Humanities from 1943 to 1946. Freeman Twaddell had an outstanding sense of humor and a horde of friends to enjoy it. On his 35th birthday his colleagues and students at Wisconsin put together a Festscrift entitled Moralische Monatshefte, William Freeman Twaddell Jubilee Number, which was a parody of the periodical Monatshefte. He came to Brown as professor of Germanic languages in 1946. In 1951 he became professor of linguistics and German. During a year’s leave of absence in 1950-51 he was research editor for Merriam-Webster Dictionaries. In 1954-55 he was a Fulbright lecturer at Ain Shaims University in Egypt. He was chairman of a consortium of linguists from Brown, Cornell, the University of Michigan, and the University of Texas, which trained Egyptian teachers of English from 1958 to 1964. On leave in 1957-58, he was a senior fellow of the Princeton University Council on the Humanities. He also taught at summer institutes at Stanford University and Indiana University and at the Universities of Michigan and Texas. From 1960 until his resignation in 1971 he was chairman of the Department of Linguistics. He died on March 1, 1982.