 Croft, Lee B., Ph.D. (Lesley Hoyt) 480-965-1002Professor, Languages and Literatures LL-402-D 85287-0202 11622 S. Tusayan Ct. Phoenix, AZ 85044 480-496-0229; 480-567-4501 cell |
 L. Croft with wife Lesley (L.) and daughter Cathy (R.) - 1992 |
A native of Cut Bank, Montana, Professor Lee B. Croft came to ASU as a faculty member from Cornell University, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1973. He had been a student at ASU in the 1960's as he pursued Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Mathematics. He completed his Master's Degree in Russian, however, at the University of Arizona in Tucson before going on to doctoral work and his first professorship at Cornell. His professional specialty is Slavic Linguistics. He was a participant of the first Joint Soviet-American Conference on the Russian Language in 1974, and he served as the Dean of Soviet Programs for the American Institute for Foreign Study in 1977. Since 1975 he has served as Coordinator of the Slavic Languages Section of the Department of Languages and Literatures, which he has also served as Assistant Chair and as Faculty Senator. He has been active in the development of ASU's academic exchange with Universitet Kiril i Metodij (UKIM) in Skopje, Macedonia and is one of the founding members of ASU's Russian and East European Studies Center (REESC). Professor Croft's professional publications focus on linguistic iconicity, on the formal aspects of poetry and poetic translation, and on the mnemonotactics of language learning. He has been one of the department's leading grantspersons and has won several awards for excellence in teaching and student mentorship: CLAS Dean's Quality Teaching Award (1978), Golden Key Honorary Student Mentorship Award (1985), Burlington Northern Foundation National Distinguished Teaching Award (1985), and others. He is a recipient (1993), as well as the fund founder and supervisor, of the Joe Malik, Jr. Arizona Slavic Studies Award. In November of 2005 he was awarded the prestigious V.I. Vernadsky-10 Years of RANS silver medal for more than thirty years of professional achievement and collaborative Russian research by the RUSSIAN ACADEMY OF NATURAL SCIENCES.
Sample Publications: 1. "Triplicity and Textual Iconicity: Russian Literature Through a Triangular Prism," in Syntactic Iconicity and Linguistic Freezes: The Human Dimension (Marge E. Landsberg, ed.), Mouton De Gruyter Publishers, Berlin/New York, 1995, pp. 249-265.
2. "Spontaneous Human Combustion in Literature: Some Literary Uses of Popular Mythology," in CLA Journal (Journal of the College Language Association), Vol. XXXVII (March 1989), No. 3, pp. 335-347