2001 AWSS Outstanding Achievement Award

[Sibelan Forrester]

We are very pleased to announce the 2001 Outstanding Achievement
Award of the Association for Women in Slavic Studies.

This year for the first time the Outstanding Achievement Award is
presented in recognition of a specialist in Linguistics:  Olga
Tsuneko Yokoyama.  As many of you know, her accomplishments are too
numerous and varied to list here in any way that might approach
completeness --this is merely a brief summary.

Olga Yokoyama is a native speaker of Japanese whose mother tongue is
Russian; her gifts as a student of languages appear to be exceeded
only by her ability as a teacher.  She is both an unusually effective
instructor and a lasting inspiration to her students.  She began to
study Slavic linguistics at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign, then completed her doctoral degree at Harvard
University, where she became the first woman to be hired by that
department after completing a degree there.  Since 1995 she has been
Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of
California, Los Angeles.

Dr. Yokoyama has made particular contributions to the field of
discourse analysis, with broad applications to the field of
linguistics as well as to literature.  Her fundamental book,
Discourse and Word Order, was published by Johns Benjamins in 1986;
she has edited or co-edited four books, and authored, at last count,
44 book chapters and articles.  Her scholarly work has supported
colleagues and students, as she has offered comments and
encouragement for countless papers, articles and dissertations, and
otherwise made life and work more possible for others in her part of
the field.  She has also been active as a scholarly translator,
including works by Roman Jakobson and (into Japanese) Ivan P. Pavlov.

We would like draw special attention to her work in Gender studies:
Dr. Yokoyama pioneered gender studies at Harvard University with a
course for graduate students, presently teaches an analogous course
at UCLA for undergraduates, and has presented papers and organized
panels on gender at AAASS and AATSEEL.  In the 1999 volume Slavic
Gender Linguistics (Margaret Mills, ed., Johns Benjamins) three
articles are written by former students who wrote dissertations under
Dr. Yokoyama's supervision (she contributed another article to the
collection herself).  Her Transactional Discourse Model offers a
productive and exciting way to approach that suggesting the existence
of male and female "genderlects" in Russian and to examine their
connections to Russian language and society.

Dr. Yokoyama demands and observes the highest academic standards as a
scholar and teacher, with a constant personal commitment to her
students and colleagues and rigorous personal integrity.  Students
and colleagues speak of her vast energy, her concern for justice and
for the emotional as well as intellectual well-being of others.
Russians she visited years ago doing field research remember her with
fondness and admiration.  One former student who works in a field not
directly related to Slavic Linguistics summed up:  "For me
personally, she remains an inspiration."

For all these reasons, AWSS is delighted to present Olga Yokoyama the
Outstanding Achievement Award for 2001, and we wish her all the best
in her life and work.

Submitted by Sibelan Forrester
(AWSS Past President, 2001-2002)

for the committee:
Christine Ruane
Beth Holmgren
Sibelan Forrester

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