December 15, 2023
The MELC department mourns Grace Martin Smith, longtime Lecturer of Turkish, who passed away in October at the age of 92.
Grace Martin Smith completed her PhD in 1974 in the Department of Near Eastern Studies (as it was then known) with a thesis on 14th-century Anatolian Turkish poetry. She then joined the Department as Lecturer of Turkish, teaching until the 1990s. Besides developing Turkish language instruction at Cal, she published works on Turkish poetry of all eras, including that of Yunus Emre, on Sufism in Turkey, and on the cuisine and food culture of the Ottoman royals. Her husband John Masson Smith (1930-2019) was also a Berkeley faculty member, in History.
An obituary published online by her family is available.