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Volney Stefflre ’58

Volney Stefflre ’58, May 31, 1994, in Davis, California. After graduating from Reed with a degree in psychology and sociology, he did graduate work at Harvard in anthropology and psychology and was a junior fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows from 1960 to 1963. His studies in sociology, anthropology, and psychology led him to do extensive research, teaching, and writing on a wide range of subjects, including computational procedures for descriptive semantics, mathematical anthropology, business and marketing theory and strategies, and hypnosis and human consciousness. During the 1960s, Volney taught psychology and sociology at Yale; the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; and the University of California, Los Angeles and Irvine campuses. In 1965–66, he served as a postdoctoral fellow in computational linguistics at RAND in Santa Monica, California. In 1978, he became a founding professor of the University of Samoa in Apia, Western Samoa. His most recent teaching post was at Trinity College of the University of Dublin, Ireland, where he was visiting professor in the school of business studies in 1990–91. Volney was also the author of Developing and Implementing Marketing Strategies (1986), and two monographs, "Human Capability and the Human Condition," published in 1990, and "Language and Behavior," published in 1991. He was program chair for the meeting of the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness and was a member of their board of directors at the time of his death. Survivors include his four children and a sister.

Appeared in Reed magazine: February 1994

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