Ruqaiya Hasan

Ruqaiya Hasan
Ruqaiya Hasan
Born	1931 Pratapgarh, Uttar Pradesh, British India
Died	24 June 2015 (aged 83) Sydney, Australia
Spouse	Michael Halliday

Ruqaiya Hasan (1931 – 14 June 2015) was a professor of linguistics who taught and held visiting positions at various universities in England. Her last appointment was at Macquarie University in Sydney, from which she retired as emeritus professor in 1994. Throughout her career she researched and published widely in the areas of verbal art, culture, context and text, text and texture, lexicogrammar and semantic variation. The latter involved the devising of extensive semantic system networks for the analysis of meaning in naturally occurring dialogues.

Born in 1931 in Pratapgarh, India, Hasan took her undergraduate degree at the University of Allahabad, in 1953, in English literature, education and history. Her elder brother Zawwar Hasan who was working as a journalist in Pakistan brought her and the rest of the family to Lahore in 1954. From 1954 to 1956, she was a lecturer at the Training College for Teachers of the Deaf, in Lahore, Pakistan. In 1958, she completed an MA in English literature at Government College Lahore, the University of the Punjab. From 1959 to 1960 she was a lecturer in English language and literature at Lahore's Queen Mary College. With a British Council scholarship, Hasan went to Edinburgh where she completed a postgraduate diploma at the University of Edinburgh in applied linguistics. In 1964 she completed her PhD in linguistics, also at the University of Edinburgh. The title of her thesis was 'A Linguistic Study of Contrasting Features in the Style of Two Contemporary English Prose Writers'. The writers were Angus Wilson and William Golding. She drew on Halliday's early work, in particular, his "Categories of the Theory of Grammar" paper, which had been published in 1961.

Between 1964 and 1971 she held various research fellowships, first with the Nuffield Foreign Languages and Teaching Materials Project, at the University of Leeds, where she directed the Child Language Survey. Between 1965 and 1967 she was a research fellow with the Nuffield Programme in Linguistics and English Teaching, at University College London. From 1968 to 1971, she worked in the Sociological Research Unit, with Basil Bernstein, where she directed the Nuffield Research Project on Sociolinguistic Aspects of Children's Stories. Following this she went to the Department of Linguistics and Anthropology, at Northwestern University in Illinois, before returning to England and taking up a lectureship in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics at the University of Essex. She migrated to Australia in 1976, and was appointed senior lecturer in linguistics at Macquarie University. She retired from Macquarie in 1994 as emeritus professor. She has held numerous visiting appointments in the US, Kenya, Japan, Singapore, Denmark, and Hong Kong.

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