RT list: Sad news - Prof Regina Blass passed away

Dear all,

Just in case you do not know this, I have heard from Helga Schröder that
Prof. Regina Blass passed away at the beginning of May, while undergoing
treatment at Nairobi Hospital. What follows is a brief note on Prof.
Blass' career taken and adapted from her obituary, which Helga Schröder
kindly sent to me.

Born in Wuppertal (Germany) in 1943, Prof. Blass started her career as a
business manager's assistant at Kolb and Company screw factory at
Wuppertal in Germany in 1961. In the 70s, she started to work for
Wycliffe Bible Translators (Germany) and began her training in
linguistics. She next went to Ghana in order to work with the _Summer
Institute of Linguistics_ (SIL) as a researcher and translator in the
Sissala language project in northern Ghana. After completing her MA
degree in 1980, she moved to Leo (Burkina Faso) and continued working on
the Sissala language.

Prof. Blass completed her PhD in linguistics at _University College
London_ (UCL) in 1988, under the supervision of Prof. Deirdre Wilson.
Her study on Sissala particles from a relevance-theoretic perspective
became widely known and is often quoted by many relevance theorists. She
continued working in the same project until 1991, when she settled in
Ouagadougou to serve as a linguistics consultant and Director of
Academic Affairs for SIL in Burkina Faso. In 1995, she moved to Niamey
and became Director of Academic Affairs for SIL in Niger. There she
taught courses in linguistics at the _University of Niamey_ and
contributed to the translation of The New Testament into Sissala by
analysing and describing this language.

In 1999, Prof. Blass moved to _Nairobi Evangelical Graduate School of
Theology_ (NEGST) and took up a teaching position as a professor in the
Translation Studies Department, where she served for sixteen years.
Later on, she became Head of Department at _Africa International
University_. Under her guidance, the department changed its name to the
Department of Language, Linguistics and Communication and new programmes
in linguistics, translation and language teaching were developed. At the
time of her death, she was Acting Dean of the School of Education, Arts
and Social Sciences.

Throughout her academic life she attended and actively participated at
many conferences on pragmatics. She presented and published many papers
in this field, and helped many students and researchers to attend those
conferences. Prof. Blass' work in linguistics is acknowledged world-wide
and her kind and loving personality and closeness will certainly be
remembered and missed.

Kindest regards,

-- 
DR. MANUEL PADILLA CRUZ 
Departamento de Filología Inglesa (Lengua Inglesa) 
Facultad de Filología - UNIVERSIDAD DE SEVILLA 
c/ Palos de la Frontera, s/n. 
41004 Sevilla (Spain) 
mpadillacruz@us.es
http://personal.us.es/mpadillacruz/ [1] 
Co-Editor - CSP Series _Advances in Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis_ 
http://www.c-s-p.org/Flyers/series_14.htm [2]
 
Links:
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[1] http://personal.us.es/mpadillacruz/
[2] http://www.c-s-p.org/Flyers/series_14.htm