Oxford University Press Selects Jessica Lasak ’05 for First Francis March Research Internship

Oxford University Press has awarded its inaugural Francis March Research Internship to Jessica Lasak ’05 of Broomall, Pa.

An English major and European history minor, Lasak began the New York internship June 7 and will work through Aug. 6. Her primary duties include research and other responsibilities involved with completing the Historical Dictionary of American Slang and related volumes.

“We think Ms. Lasak is the kind of bright young person who can best contribute to the slang program and who could become a Francis March of the future,” says project editor Grant Barrett.

He cites Lasak’s Dean’s List honors in English and work as a reference librarian assistant at Lafayette as among the qualifications that made her “a great choice” as the first Francis March intern.

“We’re excited to have Jessica aboard, and she is a natural fit for Oxford,” says Erin McKean, editor-in-chief for U.S. dictionaries. “She’s already hard at work on our slang dictionary program, and I’m confident she’ll make a very positive contribution.”

Lasak’s selection is especially fitting because Francis Andrew March, an American philologist and educator, introduced the first thoroughly scientific study of English during his tenure as a Lafayette professor. March is considered by many to be the first to propose taking the methods then used to study the classics and applying them to the study of English literature. Also, Lasak is planning a yearlong honors research project on March that she hopes will broaden the understanding of why he became an early American contributor to the Oxford English Dictionary.

For several years, notes Lasak, March served as director of American readers for the Oxford English Dictionary, leading the people who read books and found quotations for it.

“The Oxford English Dictionary is an important part of our cultural heritage,” she says. “We really understand ourselves by what we read in the dictionary — the way we describe ourselves and think about things. We often refer to the dictionary to find out what things mean. It’s an important part of American culture and the English language in general.”

“The study of his involvement with the dictionary is significant because he’s such an important character in how we understand the English language,” she adds. “It’s something that should be researched more.”

She already has made an important discovery: an inscription written to March by J.A.H Murray on the front cover of the 1881 Annual Address of the President to the Philological Society (London).

“Murray was one of the major editors of the Oxford English Dictionary and his relationship to March is better defined than it ever was before due to this find,” says Lasak.

The summer internship is providing Lasak with first-hand experience in the kind of practical and theoretical issues raised by compiling a dictionary, giving her a deeper understanding of the questions and problems that interested March, notes Bianca Falbo, assistant professor of English and co-director of the College Writing Program, who will serve as her thesis adviser. The student also will make contacts who may provide access to materials related to March and his work on the Oxford English Dictionary.

Falbo has conducted research on March and recently published an article with Pat Donahue, associate professor of English, about March’s pioneering work in English studies.

“Jessica’s research is important because there hasn’t been much scholarship done on Francis March,” she says. “March had a national reputation as a philologist in his day, but over time philology fell out of favor. It was a highly specialized kind of expertise and it was superceded in higher education by other methods of literary study that were considered more accessible for undergraduates. So for a long while, not many people were interested in a figure like March, who appears mainly in studies about curriculum or, more recently, histories of English studies which identify his importance primarily for the study of literature.”

March’s “philological” approach to literary study required extensive writing, as Falbo and Donahue noted in their article. Author Simon Winchester has brought some attention to figures like March and the cultural work of dictionary making, says Falbo. Winchester’s The Meaning of Everything notes that March taught Latin, Greek, French, German, botany, law, the U.S. Constitution, political economy, and philosophy.

“March’s career and his contributions to the study of English language and literature have yet to be really understood in their historical and cultural contexts,” she says. “I expect Jessica’s honors thesis to contribute to this emerging understanding.”

Based on their initial conversations about the thesis, Falbo has found Lasak to be “extremely ambitious and hardworking.”

“We compiled a big list of books for her to read over the summer so that when she returns in the fall, she can hit the ground running,” she says.

“I’m very happy she’s asked me to work with her. I think she’s chosen a terrific project, and I look forward to seeing how it develops.”

Lasak’s interest in March was sparked in a course taught by William Carpenter, assistant professor of English and co-director of the College Writing Program. She conducted research on how quotations were selected for the Oxford English Dictionary and on other aspects of the book and its production.

“I wrote a paper about terms in popular culture entering the dictionary, such as Homer Simpson’s ‘D’oh!’ and I believe that’s a move in the right direction,” she says, “because a dictionary should be descriptive rather than prescriptive — describing what people actually say instead of telling them what to say.”

The English department has done an excellent job of developing her interests, according to Lasak.

“It’s broadened my horizons on understanding the English language,” she says. “It’s an excellent department and I’ve really enjoyed it so far. I’ve liked all of my professors.”

A copy editor for The Lafayette, Lasak has performed in the College Choir for three years and is a member of the Anime Club and History Club. She has been a recipient of Lafayette’s Gilbert Prize, awarded annually to students who have demonstrated superiority in English.

In 1870, March published A Comparative Grammar of the Anglo-Saxon Language, and was the editor of the Douglass Series of Christian Greek and Latin Writers, to which he contributed Latin Hymns. He was president of the American Philological Association from 1873-1874 and in 1895-1896, of the Spelling Reform Association after 1876, and of the Modern Language Association from 1891-1893.

Oxford University Press is the world’s most respected lexicographical research institute and publisher of the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary. In 2003, the National Endowment for the Humanities awarded it a grant for the completion and publication of the Historical Dictionary of American Slang, a scholarly lexicon of the use of slang over the past 300 years. Lasak helped read over another book, Hatchet Jobs and Hardball: The Oxford Dictionary of American Political Slang, which Oxford University Press plans to publish this year.