Harvey Sacks Lectures 1964–1965
George Psathas (auth.), Gail Jefferson (eds.)For a period of approximately 10 years, 1964-1972, Harvey Sacks lectured at the University of California, Los Angeles and Irvine. The lectures included here were originally given at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1964 and 1965 in the years just before Sacks completed the doctoral degree at the University of California, Berkeley in 1966.
The Introduction/Memoir to this Special Issue by Emanuel A. Schegloff, his close friend and collaborator over many years, provides details concerning how Sacks worked and introduces the reader to some of the key contributions which Sacks made. Gail Jefferson, who has edited the lectures, originally worked as Sacks' transcriptionist, later went on to do her doctoral work at the University of California-Irvine with him and then became his collaborator in research. Her editorial notes provide details concerning the organization and presentation of the lectures and lecture extracts herein included.
Sacks was an original scholar, a profound genius who inspired those who met and worked with him. I had first heard of his work through David Sudnow in 1962 and later arranged to invite him to visit Washington University in St. Louis in 1965. I had by then become acquainted with his extraordinary lectures. In 1975 I arranged for him to come to Boston University where he taught two summer session courses in conversation analysis. His untimely death later that same year at the age of 40 was a loss for us all.
We regard the lectures as an important corpus of materials, just as important to American social science as George Herbert Mead's lectures six decades ago.