Researching William Hale

Hale was a graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy. He graduated at Harvard University in 1870, and took a post-graduate course in philosophy there in 1874–1876; studied classical philology at Leipzig and Göttingen in 1876–1877; was tutor in Latin at Harvard from 1877 to 1880, and succeeding Tracy Peck as professor of Latin in Cornell University from 1880 to 1892, when he became professor of Latin and head of the Latin department of the University of Chicago. From 1894 to 1899 he was chairman and in 1895-1896 first director of the American School of Classical Studies at Rome. Hale held honorary degrees from Princeton, St. Andrew's and Aberdeen Universities.

He is best known as an original teacher on questions of syntax. In The cum-constructions: their history and functions, which appeared in Cornell University studies in classical philology (1888–1889; and in German version by Neizert in 1891), he attacked Hoffmann's distinction between absolute and relative temporal clauses as published in Lateinische Zeitpartikeln (1874); Hoffmann replied in 1891, and the best summary of the controversy is in Wetzel's Der Streit zwischen Hoffmann und Hale (1892). Hale wrote also The sequence of tenses in Latin (1887–1888), The anticipatory subjunctive in Greek and Latin (1894), and a Latin grammar (1903), to which the parts on sounds, inflection and word-formation were contributed by Carl Darling Buck.

After founding the American School of Classical Studies, Rome, 1905–06, Professor Hale served as its director and later, chairman of the board. Returning to Chicago, Hale was Editor, The Classical Quarterly in 1914. He continued his teaching and retired from the university in 1920, spending the next eight years conducting research on a manuscript of Catullus he discovered in Rome in 1896.

A power player on the Osage reservation, Hale rose to local prominence through years of bribery, extortion, and intimidation. In 1921, he ordered the murders of his nephew's wife and mother-in-law, followed by her cousin, sister and brother-in-law two years later, to gain control of their oil rights.

After an MA from the University of Oxford, he was awarded a PhD at the Australian National University. He was at one time lecturer at Durham University and its Centre for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies. Professor Hale is Chair of the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy at SOAS, convenor of the Modern Turkish Studies Programme at the London Middle East Institute, and is currently a faculty member at Sabanci University. His book Turkish Foreign Policy 1774-2000 has been received as authoritative and comprehensive. Hale is currently teaching a politics course in Turkish issues, POLS 310: Turkey and Its Neighbours, at Otago University.