4 Mostly Medieval He was moreover a superb organizer and administrator. At the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań he was director (head) of the English Department – called the School of English from 1969 onwards – from 1965 until his retirement in 2006, i.e. for more than forty years. He was a member or the chairman of numerous committees and advisory boards, and he was responsible for several international exchange programs. The culmination of his career as an administrator was his appointment to Rector (president) of the AdamMickiewicz University (UAM) in Poznań from 1985–1988, and Minister of National Education of Poland 1988-1989; he was also President of the Polish-British Friendship Society from 1989–2006. He was a member (and partly also president) of many professional organizations; to mention just a few: he was a member of the International Association of University Professors of English (IAUPE), of the Henry Sweet Society for the History of Linguistic Ideas, and the International Association of University Presidents (IAUP). Moreover, he was a member of numerous Academies, to mention just a few: the Polish Academy of Sciences (Polska Akademia Nauk, PAN), the Finnish and the Norwegian Academies, the New York Academy of Sciences (NYAS), the Medieval Academy of America, the European Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters (Paris), and the Agder Academy of Sciences and Letters at Kristiansand, Norway, where he also established a Poznań chapter. He gave guest lectures at many international universities and read papers at numerous international conferences. He organized more than 50 international conferences between 1967 and 2015, i.e. well after his official retirement, and he edited the proceedings of many of them (see Writings below, pp. 6–20). In accordance with his research interests, many were devoted to English-Polish contrastive linguistics, and many to specific aspects of historical linguistics (in particular phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, typology). He founded the International Conference on Middle English (ICOME), which has been continued at threeyear intervals ever since. Jacek Fisiak was an editorial board member of many scholarly journals and book series. He was also the chief editor of, e.g., the journals Studia Anglica Posnaniensia: An International Review of English Studies SAP (from its foundation in 1967 until 2012); Folia Linguistica Historica (1978–2003); Papers and Studies in Contrastive Linguistics (1972–1999); as well as of the book series Studies in English Medieval Language and Literature SEMLL (since 2002, where close to sixty volumes have been published); Warsaw Studies in English Language and Literature WSiELL (since 2010, with 17 volumes published).
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