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(July 19, 1949–November 6, 2020)
William Graves III, PhD, the son of the American composer William Lute Graves Jr. and opera singer Mary Alice (Bennett) Graves, recently died. After four years in the Marines serving in Vietnam, Japan, Morocco, and the Philippines, Graves got his BA at the University of Maryland (Russian language and literature) and his masters’ (linguistics) and PhD (anthropology) at Indiana University, Bloomington. In the Marines, he studied Russian at the Monterey Language School (DLIFLC). After the Marines, he began his Chinese with Chieh-Fang Ou Lee.
Prior to 1974–1975, he was a USIA exhibit guide for a tour along the Silk Road, Baku, Tashkent, and Moscow. He also taught at Chinese Culture University and the Central Police University in Taiwan, Connecticut College, Rhode Island College, and was since 1989 on the Bryant University faculty.
While he studied with Herzfeld at IU, his dissertation, “The Sociocultural Construction of Grammar: A Metalinguistic Case-Study” (1988), chaired by Martha Kendall, was on the Pima. As part of his Pima work, Graves donated to the Pima an orthography and language lesson plans.
Graves’s most sustained research was in Russia and Eastern Europe, particularly Belarus and the Ukraine. As a visiting professor at European Humanities University, Minsk, Petro Mohyla University, Nikoleav, Ukraine, and Nizhny Novgorod University, Russia, he worked with his colleagues there on a number of post-Soviet post-colonial issues. He also taught at Taver University, Russia.
Graves, while at Brown as a research scientist, and after, also published on the interplay between technology, knowledge, and work. Graves also received research funding from Intel on translocal trade and technology transfer between China and Russia.
Graves had been review editor for the Russian Journal of Communication. To appreciate Bill’s scholarship, one should read his 2010 RJC paper “Vladimir Propp on the Comic and Laughter.” His research was supported by Bryant University, Fulbright awards (3), CIBEB, US Department of Education Title VI, AIFS, FLAS, and the American Philosophical Society.
Bill will be missed for his kindness and humility and his contributions to the intellectual life of a generation.
He is survived by his wife of 48 years and daughter.
(James M. Nyce)