The George Grace linguistic research and slides of Melanesia collection, 1955-1956

Dr. George Grace (b. September 8, 1921, d. January 17, 2015) was a professor emeritus at the University of Hawaii-Manoa, where he served on the faculty in the Department of Linguistics from 1964 until 1991. In 1955, while a doctoral candidate at Columbia University, Dr. Grace began work for the Tri-Institutional Pacific Project (TRIPP) — a project of Pacific anthropological research funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and administered by Yale University, the University of Hawaii, and Honolulu's Bernice P. Bishop Museum. His task was to produce a classification of the Austronesian languages of Oceania, with particular attention to the position of Polynesian languages. In 1955, after several months of library research in New York, Dr. Grace departed for Melanesia, and for the next year traveled throughout the region conducting fieldwork. During his travels -- which included stops in Hawaii, Fiji, New Caledonia, Papua New Guinea, Papua (a.k.a. West Papua/Irian Jaya) and the Solomon Islands -- Dr. Grace also shot a number of photographs, documenting a wide array of subjects within the region. In 2007, Dr. Grace donated his Melanesian field notes, photographs and related papers to Hamilton Library's Pacific Collection. This online collection contains the complete set of photographs and papers that comprise the George Grace Linguistic Research and Slides of Melanesia collection.

This collection also contains additional digitized papers including a chronology of Dr. Grace's life and work.

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