Alice Davison, an associate professor emerita in the department of linguistics at the University of Iowa, died on March 3 in Iowa City from respiratory failure. She was 76 years old.
A native of Washington, D.C., Davison was the daughter of a professor at the George Washington University School of Law. She was a graduate of Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, where she majored in French and minored in Latin. She spent her junior year abroad studying at The Sorbonne in Paris.
After working for the federal government for several years, Davison enrolled in a the Ph.D, program in linguistics at the University of Chicago. There, she developed an interest in South Asian languages and culture. After earning her doctorate in 1973, she taught at Stony Brook University of the State University of New York System. Later she taught at the University of Illinois and the University of Wisconsin before joining the faculty at the University of Iowa in 1989. She retired from teaching in 2016.