Geoffrey Lewis Memorial Fund In memory of Professor Geoffrey Lewis, CMG, 1920-2008. With the blessing of Geoffrey and Raff’s son, Jonathan Lewis, and other members of his family, St Antony’s College are establishing the Geoffrey Lewis Memorial Fund. With the money raised, we will establish an annual lecture in Geoffrey's memory. If sufficient funds are raised, we hope to provide travel and research support for students (primarily graduate students) in any aspect of Turkish studies at Oxford. Geoffrey had a style of learning that combined erudition with wit, sympathy, great analytic skills and brilliantly lucid exposition. This fund will help St Antony’s to enable others to make their own contribution to the field of study to which Geoffrey devoted his life. Dr Celia Kerslake, current University Lecturer in Turkish, writes – Geoffrey Lewis, who had been a Governing Body Fellow of St Antony’s College from 1961 until his retirement in 1987, was (from 1950) Oxford’s first University Lecturer in Turkish, and the person more than anyone else responsible for the development of Turkish studies into a fully-fledged degree subject (1964) within the Honour School of Oriental Studies. He was also recognized within the UK as a whole, as well as in the wider world, as a pioneering scholar of Turkish language and culture, who made major contributions to our understanding of that country and its people. As scholarly and popular interest in Turkey grew in the decades after the Second World War, Geoffrey Lewis’s Teach Yourself Turkish (1953) made this fascinating language readily accessible to English-speakers in a way that it had not been before. Two years later his Turkey (1955), in Ernest Benn’s Nations of the Modern World series, gave the general reader a similarly lucid presentation of Turkey’s modern history, geography, demography and culture. Both these works went into revised editions, Teach Yourself Turkish in 1989 and Turkey in 1959, 1965 and (this time as Modern Turkey) in 1974. Lewis’s scholarly publications were initially in the Arabic studies field (in which he had done his D.Phil.), but his Turkish Grammar (1967) was to see him well and truly established as a world authority on the language that had become his real love. Well into his retirement The Turkish Language Reform: A Catastrophic Success (1999) brought together the fruit of many years’ work on the linguistic purification that, for better or worse, has been such an integral part of the process of modernization in Turkey. The gentle humour that is such an appealing characteristic of all Lewis’s writings here has full rein in exposing the more outrageous claims made by the mid-20th-century language engineers about some of the neologisms promulgated in the name of “pure Turkish”. As a person, Geoffrey Lewis will be remembered for his kindness, his determination to see the best in others, and his love of jokes. Inevitably his memory will always be linked with that of his wife Raphaela (Raff), whose sudden death four years ago had been such a bitter blow to Geoffrey, depriving him of a partnership going back over more than sixty years. After the tragic death of their daughter Lally, in 1976, Geoffrey and Raff had played a very special role in the lives of her two children, one of whom made a moving tribute at the funeral. In their latter years Geoffrey and Raff lived just opposite St Antony’s, in Woodstock Road, in the same house that they had rented from St John’s in the early years of Geoffrey’s career in Oxford. Geoffrey was therefore a familiar figure in college right up to the end of his life. He will be sadly missed in Oxford, in the Turkish studies community in Britain and overseas, and in Turkey itself, where he was held in great affection and esteem.
Should you wish to make a contribution towards Geoffrey Lewis' Memorial Fund, there are several ways you can do this:
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