Learning may begin in a classroom—but it doesn’t have to stop there.

Few people embody that idea more than Douglas Kibbee, former director of the School of Literatures, Cultures & Linguistics and emeritus professor of French.

For him, learning isn’t a means to an end. It’s a lifelong journey.

“That’s the joy of being a university professor,” said Kibbee. “You’re constantly learning. I don’t think I ever taught the same course twice, for example. Even if the name of the course was the same, at least 40 percent of the material was new every time. That was just part of the joy of learning. I’ve now been able to pursue that joy for a lifetime.”

Kibbee began his career at Western Kentucky University before coming to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1985. He started out as an assistant professor, teaching French linguistics. While he has since retired, that doesn’t mean he’s stopped his pursuit of knowledge.

“I retired in 2010, but I’ve remained a very active scholar,” he said. “I consider it continuous from ’85 to today, so almost 40 years now. And the university, through its various support programs for research and teaching initiatives, has given me so many opportunities I treasure over those four decades.”

Through the university’s support, Kibbee was able to spend two summers in Quebec and direct the study abroad program in Paris one year, two standout memories for the emeritus professor. It also gave him the freedom to research what he wanted to.

Kibbee’s research has focused on various aspects of French language. He’s largely worked on the history of the language, and how a standard was created and imposed on the French people. His first book, “For to Speke French Trewely: The French Language in England, 1000-1600: Its Status, Description and Instruction,” published in 1991, looked at the status of the French language in England after the Norman Invasion of England in 1066. His latest book, which is currently in development, is a critical edition of “Remarques sur la langue françoise,” a commentary on French published in 1634, right around the time that French was becoming standardized.

Kibbee also became interested in issues of language policy: how governments regulate languages, both in France and in the United States. His work on language policy examines the treatment of minority languages in the two countries, focusing on recent and current attitudes, statutes, and legal decisions, while also filling in some of the historical events and legal precedents leading to current conditions. His 2016 book, “Language and the Law: Linguistic Inequality in America,” shows the impact of language issues on various structures in the US, including its education, voting, and employment systems.

“All of these things are impacted by language issues, and those things then create inequalities,” said Kibbee. “For a long time, for instance, voting was only in English, and there were tests people had to take before voting. It was a way to keep people from voting and maintain mainstream power.”

Kibbee says his most niche interest came about thanks to the University of Illinois. He was asked to teach a course on translating English to French and French to English, which sent him down the Alice in Wonderland rabbit hole.  

“There aren’t that many books that get retranslated,” he explained. “When I first started collecting Alice in Wonderland in the late 80s, I discovered about a dozen at that point that had already been made. Now, we’re up to 51, so it was that opportunity to compare multiple translations of a single work that first drew me in. Then, as I got more into it, I found the text itself fascinating and challenging. Often, the author is not using standard English, and if you have something that’s incorrect to start with, you have to find a way to translate it that’s similarly incorrect.”

Just this March, Kibbee presented on the challenges of translating Lewis Carroll into French in a webinar by the Lewis Carroll Society of North America. Kibbee said it all goes back to the university’s support.

“It made it possible to not only support my own little corner of obscure academia, but it also gave me the opportunity to engage with colleagues who are all at the top of their field and taught me so much more than I ever thought I could learn,” said Kibbee.

It wasn’t just his colleagues he learned from, either.

“Every class was a new challenge to my mind,” said Kibbee, who was even given the freedom to create new courses, both at the undergraduate and graduate level and within the Campus Honors Program.

One of his favorites was a course on language policies in the European Union, which is still taught by professors from the Department of French & Italian nearly every spring. 

“Each student would pick a country in the EU and learn about the language issues each particular country faced,” said Kibbee. “And so I could teach them about French, but I learned so much from them, as they told me about Estonia and Hungary and all of the other places that had obstacles which I was vaguely or not at all aware of.”

While Kibbee was endlessly seeking new knowledge, he was also making an impact on his students and colleagues. The Douglas A. Kibbee Prize was created by Kibbee’s peers, friends, and students in honor of his distinguished career and service as first director of the school, and on the occasion of his retirement in 2010. The prize is awarded annually to the recipient of an SLCL Dissertation Completion Fellowship whose project is judged by a committee to be the most outstanding.

“Much of the funding for the prize came from my colleagues, but I continue to contribute to it because I believe in it,” said Kibbee. “It’s exciting to see the future faculty of the world coming out of our programs, and the ideas they have, the projects they’re developing, are just amazing. I I want them to enjoy the kind of support I’ve always received here.”