Tribute to Dr. Waclaw Osadnik on his Retirement

11 December 2023

Dr. Waclaw Osadnik has retired after teaching at the University of Alberta for 33 years. Dr. Osadnik began teaching in MLCS in 1999. We thank him for his contribution to MLCS and celebrate his outstanding career as we congratulate him on his retirement. Read more about Dr. Osadnik below.

Biography

Dr Waclaw Michael Osadnik was born in Upper Silesia, Poland. He graduated with an MA in General and South Slavic Linguistics from the Jagiellonian University in Cracow. In 1973 he began his academic career as an instructor and researcher at the Institute of General Linguistics, University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland. From 1977-1978, he had a postgraduate position in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University, New Haven, Conn. USA. In 1981 he defended his summa cum laude doctoral dissertation in applied linguistics and semiotics.

From 1985-1986 he served as a Deputy Director of the Institute of General Linguistics, University of Silesia in Katowice. In 1986 he moved to the Institute for Slavic Studies at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. In 1987 he took a leave of absence from the Institute to accept a Post-Doctoral Fellowship at Queensland University, Brisbane, Australia. From 1989-1990 he was a Research Associate in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literature, University of California at Berkeley.

After immigrating to Canada in 1990, he took a position of a lecturer and researcher in the Department of Film and Comparative Literature, and in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta. As a full professor he continued his research on application of net theories to the study of language.

Dr Waclaw M. Osadnik coordinated the Polish Program in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies, and he served as a member of the Advisory Board of the Wirth Institute for Austrian and Central European Studies.

He published 7 books, edited 20 collections of articles, published 42 articles in professional journals and 63 studies and chapters in books and anthologies.