Prof. Ramsey receiving medal and award from Ambassador Lee Hong-gu

Professor S. Robert Ramsey 2106 Jimenez Hall University of Maryland College Park, MD 20742 Phone : 301-405-4256 Email: ramsey@umd.edu

S. Robert Ramsey is professor of East Asian linguistics at the University of Maryland and immediate past chair of the Department of Asian and East European Languages and Cultures. He has also taught at Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania. He has received teaching awards from the Korean Student Association and the Asian Student Union at the University of Maryland, and from the Center for Teaching Excellence at the same university.

Ramsey does primary research on the historical development of Japanese and Korean and the historical relationships between the two languages. He is perhaps best known for his work on Korean dialects and the reconstruction of prehistoric stages of Korean. He has also written extensively on sociolinguistic topics. Author of three books and several dozen articles, he has also lectured widely on various linguistic topics in Japan, Korea, Europe, and the United States. His book The Languages of China (Princeton) was published in Japanese translation in 1991 (Taishukan). His most recent book-length work, The Korean Language, was co-authored with Professor Lee Iksop of Seoul National University and was published in December 2000 by SUNY Press. He has begun writing a similar book on Japanese. At present he is engaged in a collaborative project with Professor Lee Ki-Moon of Seoul National University to produce an English-language history of Korean, which will be published by Cambridge University Press.

Ramsey has served as president of the International Circle of Korean Linguistics and is a charter member and the former Secretary of the Executive Board, American Association of Teachers of Korean. He has been an outside evaluator for the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean language programs at numerous institutions; he has served as a member of the College Board's advisory boards for the projects to develop College Board Achievement Tests in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean; he has also been a member of the Working Committee, Japanese Language Study Survey, National Foreign Language Center. He has served twice as member of the Executive Committee of the Association of Teachers of Japanese. In 1998 he was chosen by President Kim Dae Jung to receive the annual Presidential Hangul Award. He is currently serving as Overseas Director of the Society of Korean Language and Literature.