University of North Texas

Faculty Member, Linguistics and Technical Communication

About

Haj (a.k.a. John Robert) Ross was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on May 7, 1938, in the Year of the Earth Tiger.  He is Taurus, born with a Sun-Uranus conjunction, and with his Moon and Ascendant conjoined in Leo.
He attended the Poughkeepsie (New York) Day School, Philips Academy, Andover, then Yale University, where he majored in linguistics, graduating in June 1960.  Following Yale, he was awarded a scholarship from the German Academic Exchange Service, and went to Germany, for three semesters of graduate study, two in Bonn, and one in Berlin.  Upon returning to the US, he was the recipient of a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, with the help of which he went to the University of Pennsylvania, where he completed a Master’s degree in linguistics, writing a thesis, “A Partial Grammar of English Superlatives,” under the supervision of Zellig Harris, graduating in May 1964.
Following Penn, he attended MIT, where he was awarded a Ph. D. in linguistics in September 1967.  His doctoral dissertation, “Constraints on Variables,” was supervised by Noam Chomsky.
From July 1966 to October 1985, he was a professor in the MIT Department of Linguistics.  From April 1988 until April 1992, he was a Visiting Professor in the Departamento de Lingüística of the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (in Belo Horizinte, Brasil).  In 1992-1993, he was a Visiting Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature of the National University of Singapore.  In 1993-1994, he was a Visiting Professor in the Department of First Nation Studies at the University of Northern British Columbia (in Prince George), and from 1994 to the present, he has been teaching at the University of North Texas (in Denton), first in the Department of English, and as of August, 2008, in the Department of Linguistics and Technical Communication.
He has also taught seminars and shorter courses in Japan, Germany, Sweden, Egypt, Tunisia, and Yugoslavia, as well as at various universities in the US.
He has done research in linguistics in syntax, semantics, pragmatics, morphology, phonology, and phonetic symbolism.  In addition, for the past third of a century, he has been working interdisciplinarily, trying to establish a bridge linking poetics and linguistics.  He is interested in creativity in general, and thus in developing more powerful methods of learning together, which he suspects will come through softening, and ultimately transcending, all supposed boundaries dividing philosophy, science, religion, and art.  He is a peerless grade-inflator.
He is married to another linguist, Rosália Dutra, with whom he has a twenty-one-year-old son, Nicholas Dutra Ross.  He has a son, Daniel Erik, and a daughter, Aina Valeska, from his first marriage, and has been a grandfather, since June of 2009, of Stella Rose Deschenes, Valeska’s daughter.
He regards a life unsurrounded by cats as as silly as one without music and art, which he plays, poorly, on his guitar, and paints, ditto, respectively, with artist markers.

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