Gene Buckley

Phonologist, colleague, teacher, mentor, and friend, Gene Buckley, who enriched the life of our department for over 33 years, died in June 2025 after a long illness.

Gene came to Penn in 1992 after obtaining his PhD  from the University of California, Berkeley, as a student of Larry Hyman. An internationally recognized expert on Kashaya, a southwestern Pomoan language of northern California, Gene’s work with many of the last speakers of this severely endanged language is notable both for its rich descriptive interest and for its theoretical sophistication.

In addition to Kashaya, Gene was also an expert in Alsea and Yaquina, related languages of Oregon; his work was instrumental in collecting, analyzing and digitially preserving all the data which remains for these now-extinct isolates.

Gene’s theoretical work was focused principally on prosodic phonology, Optimality Theory, and morphophonology in  papers on a wide range of languages, including also Manam (Indonesian) and Tigrinya (Ethiopic). He also served on the advisory board of the journal Language.

As a teacher, Gene was known for his rigorous sense of organization, exceptional clarity of presentation, and scrupulous fairness. Besides teaching phonology to generations of graduate students, he also designed and taught two perennially popular undergraduate courses — Writing Systems, and Language in Native America —which drew in dozens of students to our field.

In addition Gene served as graduate chair of the department for eighteen years (the longest term in any department in the School of Arts and Sciences in recent memory). He was responsible for admissions and negotations regarding graduate student funding, and he initiated and implemented multiple revisions in the departmental regulations. Ultimately Gene guided more than a hundred students through “the system” to a departure into the academic or professional world.

Those of us who knew him will always remember the attention and care he devoted to everything he undertook; his sound judgment, not only in scientific matters but also during any dispute or crisis; and most of all, his sheer love of language, his optimism and his sparkling wit.

When asked, “Do some people think that phonology is a dry sort of subject?” Gene answered: “If so, then we are like desert plants. It must be that in this climate, we thrive best.”

Written by Gene's longtime colleague and friend, Dr. Rolf Noyer.