A Note on Letters from Jit Phoumisak to William J. Gedney, 1953-1958

Abstract

William J. Gedney, the leading scholar of Thai linguistics in the United States in the last half of the 20th century, and Jit Phoumisak, at the time an undergraduate at Chulalongkorn University, established an unexpected and productive working relationship in the early 1950s in Bangkok. That relationship was forcibly ended at the start of 1954 when Jit was accused as a leftist and suspended from his studies at Chulalongkorn University, and when Gedney was required to return to the United States due to the loss of his visa. Their friendship and concern for each other did not end. They met one or two times over the ensuing years prior to Jit’s death, and, it turns out, they exchanged letters, six of which were among Gedney’s effects at his death in 1999. These made their way into the University of Michigan Library’s Special Collections in 2009, but they have escaped notice by scholars until recently. This brief note introduces the letters and puts them into the context of the lives of the two men at the time of their writing.