Charles Joseph Quinn, Jr.

Charles (who also went by CJ or Charlie) was born on June 20, 1948 in the East Oaklane neighborhood in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He was the son of Charles J. Quinn and Marie Fleischmann Quinn and the older brother of Patricia Quinn (O’Hagan). After graduating from Cardinal Dougherty High School in 1966, he earned a B.A. cum laude in English in 1970 from Lasalle University in Philadelphia. In 1972, he received an M.A. in English from Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan. While at Michigan State, Charles worked as a teaching assistant at the English Language Center, whose director happened to be from Japan. Thanks to the professor’s recommendation, Charles was offered a position teaching English conversation in the Matsuyama area on the island of Shikoku. Though the job fell through due to lack of funding, Charlie made ends meet in Matsuyama by picking mandarin oranges (mikan) at a nearby farm. He learned a lot of Japanese language and made many friends. Eventually, he took a teaching position at an English school owned by the Sony Corporation in Fukuoka on the island of Kyushu and taught there several years. These were some of the first of his many experiences living in Japan and the beginning of a lifetime as a student and then a scholar of Japanese language and culture.

Charles completed a Master’s degree at The University of Michigan in 1981 and earned his Ph.D. there in 1987, both in Japanese literature and linguistics. He worked especially closely with two faculty mentors, Professor Robert H. Brower in Japanese literature and classical Japanese language, and Professor Pete Becker in linguistics. While writing his doctoral dissertation, he was employed as a lecturer in Japanese language and literature at Indiana University, Bloomington. His duties included building the Japanese program and training graduate teaching assistants. In 1987 he accepted a tenure-track position on the faculty of the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures (DEALL) at The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio. In 1988 he married Shelley Fenno (Quinn), who was on the Japanese literature faculty in DEALL. They worked there together as colleagues for 34 years.

Charles’s research interests spanned two primary areas of specialization. He was a historical linguist who researched syntax, morphology and their interrelations with genre and discourse in Old Japanese (Nara period) and Early Middle Japanese (Heian period) texts. He was interested in the rhetorical uses of grammatical constructions in the texts of those periods, and he situated his analyses in the co-evolving contexts of propositional content, information, and (inter)subjectivity to provide insights into how writers in Japan employed language to express their ideas more than a millennium ago.

Charles was also deeply committed to pursuing teaching and research in Japanese language pedagogy. He was part of a Japanese language program in DEALL whose shared emphasis is on language as performed culture. In his own words, he saw language learning as a process of language socialization, “aimed at enabling the performance (and thus creation) of a viable persona/self in another culture.” He viewed his study of everyday genres of talk and text in the pedagogy of today’s language as parallel to his studies of classical Japanese in that both commanded attention to “semi-regular ways in which purposes, audiences, words, and grammar mutually implicate one another.”

In addition to his position as Associate Professor at OSU, he was a visiting researcher at Keio University, Tohoku University, and the National Institute of Multimedia Education. Among the grantors that supported his research were the Fulbright-Hays Professional Research Fellowship Foundation, the Social Science Research Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He, with Jane M. Bachnik, co-authored and edited Situated Meaning: Inside and Outside in Japanese Self, Society and Language (Princeton 1994). His articles on deriving inflected adjectives, on particles zo and ka, and adnominal-concordant kakari-musubi have appeared in publications such as Japanese/Korean Linguistics, and for the last two decades, he was lead developer of Classical Japanese Portal (CJP), an interactive multimedia website that is used by students of classical Japanese language around the world.

The fact that Charles chose to apply his knowledge of classical Japanese to create a pedagogical tool such as CJP is indicative of his outstanding dedication to educating his students. Another indicator of that dedication is that in 1990 he received the OSU Alumni University Distinguished Teaching Award, The Ohio State University, and he was nominated for it again in 2011. His graduate students speak of his integrity, his expertise and commitment, and his ability to challenge students to think critically. One of his Ph.D. students recently wrote, “He was the most committed, kind, and giving mentor that I have ever known.”

Charles loved the southern New Jersey shore. From junior high school, he spent his summers in Sea Isle City, New Jersey, and he was a lifeguard for the Sea Isle City Beach Patrol throughout college and into graduate school. He liked aquatic sports. Along with being a strong swimmer, he competed for three years on the Lasalle University rowing team. He was also a serious amateur guitarist and especially enjoyed bluegrass and old-time music. He was an enthusiastic student of the clawhammer banjo as well. And like his father, Charles loved baseball, especially the Philadelphia Phillies.

Charles’s family members include his wife, Shelley Fenno Quinn of Columbus, Ohio; his maternal aunt, Mrs. Jane Connelly of Galloway, New Jersey; a nephew, David B. Maxwell of Boscawen, New Hampshire; three nieces, Shanna O’Hagan of Egg Harbor Township, New Jersey, Alison W. Maxwell of Saint Petersburg, Florida, and Roslyn T. Maxwell of Raymond, New Hampshire; a sister-in-law, Gwen L. Fenno of Essex Junction, Vermont; two brothers-in-law, Michael O’Hagan of Lewisburg, West Virginia, and John J. Maxwell of Exeter, New Hampshire; a grandniece, Charlotte Clay of Raymond, New Hampshire; and many cousins. Charles will be greatly missed by all who knew and loved him. He is predeceased by his parents, his sister Patti, his mother-in-law, Marilyn W. Fenno, and his sister-in-law, Lynn F. Maxwell.

A memorial service celebrating Charles will be held at 4 P.M. Thursday, July 27, 2023 at SCHOEDINGER NORTHWEST, 1740 Zollinger Rd., where family will receive friends at a reception immediately following the service, lasting until 7 P.M. If desired, in lieu of flowers donations may be made to the Atsushi Onoe Memorial Fund (Fund Number 665555), Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, The Ohio State University (https://www.giveto.osu.edu/makeagift/details/665555), or to the National Audubon Society (https://www.audubon.org/).