Fredric Thomas Dolezal

Fredric T. Dolezal (Ph.D. Theoretical Linguistics, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) is Presiding Officer for the International Society for the History of Lexicography and Lexicology (ISHLL website), and, Book Series Co-Editor, World Histories of Lexicography and Lexicology; he has research interests in literary lexicography and history of semantics and philosophical grammars, especially as these linguistically-based studies raise questions concerning the dictionary as text, the literariness of literary theory, and the theory and practice of bibliography; the preceding is informed largely by his work on constructed languages and lexicons of the 17th century, classification systems, and other methods of transmitting and representing words and concepts across space and time.

Dr. Dolezal taught across the curriculum in Theoretical Linguistics and English Literary Studies. His most recent courses included Seminar on Knowledge Representation and the Lexicon; Lexicography; Advanced Writing: Nature Writing, principles and practice; English Grammar; Theory and Criticism: Linguistic Ideas in Literary Theory; Keywords in English: Language, Thought and Culture; King Lear at the Movies; and Film as Literature.

Dr. Dolezal's most recent edited volume, Broadening Perspectives in the History of Dictionaries and Word Studies (2021; Hans Van de Velde, co-editor, Cambridge Scholars Publishing), is a collection of international scholarship representing current trends in historical and critical lexicography and lexicology. Most recently he was invited to present the annual lecture of the Helsinki Society for Lexicography which took place in May of 2023. His presentation was On First Looking into Louis-Lucien Bonaparte’s Copy of Wilkins’s and Lloyd’s Dictionaries: A Lexicographical Whodunnit. 

Dr. Dolezal serves as an editor of a new book series launched by Language Science Press in June 2024, World Histories of Lexicography and Lexicology. A revised and expanded chapter, "World Englishes and Lexicography" has been published in the 2nd Edition of The Handbook of World Englishes (Wiley Blackwell, January 2020).  A book chapter crossing the domains of the history of the book and feminist historiography of linguistics, "Did Anne Maxwell print John Wilkins's Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (1668)?", has been published in a collection entitled Historical Dictionaries in their Paratextual Contexts (Roderick McConchie; Jukka Tyrkkö, editors. De Gruyter, 2018); Ward J. Risvold, Assistant Professor, Georgia College and State University, is co-author.