The man. Harald Weinrich, an honorary member of the modern language association since 1996, may be the quintessential interdisciplinary humanist. Having mastered French as a young internee in France at the end of World War II, he began his academic career as a Romance philologist in the tradition of Erich Auerbach and Ernst Robert Curtius, with professorships successively at the universities of Kiel and Cologne. In a second career he became a professor of linguistics at the new University of Bielefeld (which he helped to found and where he served as director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research); then he established in Munich the first program for the teaching of German as a foreign language. Following his compulsory retirement, he received the honor (extraordinary for a foreigner) of an appointment as professor of Romance studies at the prestigious Collège de France, from which he is now also retired. He has published writing of great scholarly and public resonance in all these areas. Among his voluminous output (translated into many languages) are Tempus, a wide-ranging and meticulously nuanced study of tense use in the major literatures of Western Europe; a prizewinning short book of cultural linguistics entitled Linguistik der Lüge (Linguistics of Lying); “text grammars” of French and of German that aim to record not just morphology and syntax but also the usage problems that confront speakers and writers of all foreign languages; Lethe: Kunst und Kritik des Vergessens (Lethe: The Art and Critique of Forgetting, his first book to appear in English) and much other work on cultural topics, including memory and politeness; and dozens of essays on the teaching and learning of languages and on problems of intercultural understanding.