UChicago News

Anne Pippin Burnett, renowned scholar of Greek poetry, 1925–2017

Mon, 12 Jun 2017 16:30 -0500

Prof. Anne Pippin Burnett, a renowned scholar of Greek poetry and a UChicago faculty member for more than three decades, passed away April 26 at her home in Kingston, Ontario. She was 91.

Burnett focused her research on Greek tragedies and lyrical poetry. She wrote extensively on the archaic and early classical periods, including three books on the ancient Greek poet, Pindar.

Burnett, professor emerita in the Department of Classics, first joined the UChicago faculty in 1961 as an assistant professor, becoming a professor in 1970. She served as chairman of the Department of Classical Languages and Literatures from 1969 thru 1973. She retired in 1992.

Longtime colleague Peter White, the Herman C. Bernick Family Professor in Classics and the College, remembered Burnett as a true star of the department.

“Anne chose to study poets like Euripides and Pindar who were challenging intellectually and brilliant verbally, which was just what her own writing was like,” said White, who joined the UChicago faculty in 1968. “Although she was a celebrity in our field, she did not seem to chase celebrity. She just wrote and wrote one interesting, original study after another, and her audience grew.”

Prior to her time at UChicago, Burnett taught at Vassar College and worked as an editor and translator at the Hachette publishing house.

Among her many honors during a distinguished academic career, Burnett was selected as a Guggenheim fellow in 1981 and delivered the Classics Department’s inaugural George B. Walsh Memorial Lecture in 1989.

She is survived by daughters Maud Burnett McInerney and Melissa Gromoff and three grandchildren.

A memorial service is planned for the fall.

Menachem Brinker, Hebrew studies scholar and activist, 1935-2016

Thu, 22 Sep 2016 16:45 -0500

Prof. Emeritus Menachem Brinker was known for his pioneering scholarship on philosophy and Hebrew literature as well as the relationships between philosophy, literature and society. The University’s first Henry Crown Professor of Modern Hebrew Language and Literature in Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations, he established the Modern Hebrew Language and Literature program at UChicago in 1995 and held the first chair in the program.

The noted Hebrew scholar, Israel Prize laureate and peace activist died Aug. 11 of pancreatic cancer at his home in Jerusalem. He was 81.

In 2004, he was awarded the Israel Prize—the most highly regarded award in Israel—for Hebrew and general literary research. He was the author of numerous books; among them the authoritative work on Yosef Haim Brenner, a Russian pioneer of modern Hebrew literature. He divided his time between Chicago and Hebrew University until his 2005 retirement, when he returned to Israel.

Brinker also was a prominent political activist who was one of the first to advocate for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He co-founded the critical literary and political review magazine EMDA (Hebrew for “position, opinion, policy”) and was its first editor. Then he co-founded Peace Now and was one of the leaders of the organization, Israel’s pre-eminent peace movement, well into the 1980s and ‘90s.

“He was a voice of sanity relating to Israel,” said Josef Stern, the William H. Colvin Professor of Philosophy Emeritus and the inaugural director of the Chicago Center for Jewish Studies, remembering Brinker as a cultured, witty and intellectual colleague. “In exchanges, he could be wonderfully critical,” Stern said, but Brinker’s criticisms were well received because of his “extremely warm personality.”

Besides teaching and building the Modern Hebrew Language and Literature program, Brinker helped bolster the University’s library, filling gaps in its collection in his fields of expertise, Stern said.

Paul Mendes-Flohr, the Dorothy Grant Maclear Professor of Modern Jewish History and Thought, considered Brinker a beloved friend and mentor.

“Not only was Menachem generous intellectually, he was also blessed with the gift of friendship, which he nurtured and sustained with unflagging care and concern,” he said.

“As one of Israel’s most esteemed public intellectuals, his probing critiques of its cultural and political life attained a unique resonance precisely because they bore the stamp of a compelling existential concern for the ethical and spiritual direction the country had taken,” Mendes-Flohr said.

Brinker was born in Jerusalem on Sept. 20, 1935. Before commencing his university studies, Menachem was a shepherd in a left-wing kibbutz. In 1954, he completed his undergraduate degree in Hebrew literature and philosophy. He studied literature, linguistic theory and philosophy at Edinburgh and Oxford universities in 1966, and then earned his doctorate in philosophy at Tel Aviv University in 1974.

Brinker fought as part of the Jerusalem Brigade during the Six-Day War and also fought in the Yom Kippur War. In 1968, he was appointed a lecturer in the Tel Aviv University philosophy department, and a year later he was appointed to the department of poetics and comparative literature, which he also helped found.

In addition, Brinker was among the founders of the Israel Philosophical Association in 1967. Beginning in 1983, he taught philosophy and Hebrew literature at Hebrew University. At the same time, he served as a literary editor at the Keter publishing house. He was a member of the Israeli Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

Mendes-Flohr said his friendship with Brinker was sealed when they were both on the faculty of Hebrew University. Mendes-Flohr “consulted with him about a concept coined by Jean-Paul Sartre, whom he knew personally and about whom he had written extensively.”

He said Brinker knew hundreds of poems by heart, not only in Hebrew but also English, French, German, Russian, Yiddish and even a few in Arabic. In his last weeks, Brinker composed a poem in alternating stanzas in Hebrew, English and French, and though he was too weak to write it down, he would recite it to his friends.

“What I do recall is his joyful and mellifluous recitation of this, his last poem, which he took with him to his final resting place,” Mendes-Flohr said. “As one says in Hebrew, “zikhrono le’vracha: May his memory be a blessing to all who loved him and to the many whom he loved. “

Brinker is survived by his partner, Janet Aviad, and his daughter, Hagit. His son, Gadi, died in 2010.

Services have been held in Israel. At his request, no eulogies were given, but poems were recited by some of Israel’s eminent writers.

Halil Inalcik, historian of Ottoman Empire and University Professor, 1916-2016

Mon, 01 Aug 2016 15:30 -0500

Prof. Halil Inalcik, a preeminent expert on the Ottoman Empire who trained two generations of scholars in the United States and Turkey, died on July 25. He was 100 years old.

Inalcik’s research was critical in elevating the Ottoman period to a leading role in the study of world history. His scholarly work was marked by rigorous research of source materials, and his writings, including The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age 1300–1600, became critical texts for historians around the world.

“Without exaggeration one really has to say he not only created but actually built the study of things Ottoman and the Ottoman Empire in its many cultural, political and economic contexts. He was really and truly the master,” said Cornell Fleischer, the Kanuni Suleyman Professor of Ottoman and Modern Turkish Studies.

Inalcik was born in Istanbul in the final years of the Ottoman Empire and received his formal education in Turkey, completing his PhD at the University of Ankara in 1942. He later wrote his childhood in Istanbul partly drew him to his field of study, but a bigger factor was the rich and expansive source materials from the Ottoman period.

Inalcik was recruited to UChicago in the early 1970s from the University of Ankara by Prof. William McNeill, a pioneer in the field of world history. Inalcik, who also taught at Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University, became one of UChicago’s early University Professors, an appointment reserved for scholars with internationally recognized eminence in their fields and potential for high impact across the University.

Inalcik held appointments in History and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations.

“Halil Inalcik was a scholar of international repute whose work was marked by high erudition, superb critical analysis and an extraordinary command of vast historical sources. We were greatly honored that he was a member of our faculty,” said John W. Boyer, the Martin A. Ryerson Professor in History and dean of the College.

At the University, Inalcik trained a series of young historians who became top scholars, while continuing his own research, which spanned the history of Crimea, Albania and Anatolia in the 15th century to Bulgaria in the 19th century. His work encompassed social, political and economic history from peasants to sultans.

“Professor Inalcik transformed the field of Ottoman studies from an obscure and exotic sub-field into one of the leading historical disciplines. He has set the agenda for critical analysis and understanding of a crucial time period in world history,” said Fariba Zarinebaf, PhD’91, a former student of Inalcik and associate professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at the University of California at Riverside.

Inalcik retired from the University in 1986 and became a professor emeritus. He returned to Turkey and founded the history department at Bilkent University in Ankara. Inalcik received numerous honors during his lifetime, including 23 honorary doctorates and awards in Turkey for his contributions to history and culture.

Inalcik wrote about his life and career in an essay published in 1993, including his time at the University. One of his favorite memories was a visit to campus by dervishes from Turkey who practice Islamic mysticism. He remembered being deeply moved as their cries reverberated off the ceiling of a University chapel.

William H. McNeill, world historian and distinguished scholar, 1917-2016

Tue, 12 Jul 2016 14:00 -0500

Prof. William H. McNeill, a pioneer in the field of world history and author of the seminal work The Rise of the West, died July 8. He was 98.

McNeill, AB’38, AM’39, was a teacher and scholar for four decades at the University of Chicago. The Robert A. Millikan Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in History, he was the author of more than 20 books, from the sweeping history of human disease Plagues and Peoples to a memoir of the University during the presidency of Robert Hutchins.

McNeill was awarded the Erasmus Prize in 1996 and National Humanities Medal by President Obama in 2010. The Rise of the West, which traces civilizations through 5,000 years of recorded history, received the National Book Award for history and biography in 1964.

In a 1987 interview at the time of his retirement, McNeill said it was important for historians not to be too narrow in their outlook. “History has to look at the whole world,” he said. “And that means you have to know how the rest of the world is, how it got to be the way it is.”

McNeill was critical in launching the field of world history at a time when the discipline was narrowly focused on the history of Europe and its past and present colonies. In his work, he emphasized the connections and exchanges between civilizations rather than placing them in a vacuum.

“Bill McNeill was a scholar of extraordinary boldness, range and high creativity,” said John W. Boyer, the Martin A. Ryerson Professor in History and dean of the College. “He was able to see patterns and relationships among highly complex and disparate historical phenomena on a global level in ways that enabled him to write magnificent and courageous books of large intellectual compass.”

Boyer said McNeill provided decisive leadership during his chairmanship of the Department of History in the 1960s, rebuilding it into a preeminent site for international historical research after the department had lost much of its luster in the 1940s and ‘50s.

An early interest in history

McNeill was born in Vancouver, British Columbia. His father, John McNeill, was a historian of Christianity whose efforts to tell the story of faith through the connections among denominations inspired his son.

McNeill arrived at the University of Chicago as a 10-year-old when his father was appointed to the University faculty. He graduated from the Laboratory Schools and received bachelor’s and master’s degrees from UChicago before attending Cornell to pursue a PhD in history.

McNeill’s studies were interrupted by his service in World War II, which included an assignment as assistant military attaché in Cairo. The position led to his working with Greek and Yugoslav governments in exile, making him an eyewitness to the middle stages of the Greek civil war. He wrote his first book from that experience, The Greek Dilemma: War and Aftermath, published in 1947.

In Cairo he met his future wife, Elizabeth Darbishire, who worked for the Office of War Information. She became his proofreader, critic and collaborator. They had four children together.

After the war, he completed his PhD at Cornell, and in 1947, he joined the faculty at the University of Chicago.

While in graduate school, McNeill stumbled across Arnold Toynbee’s The Study of History, which was an attempt to chart the rise and fall of world civilizations. Although he later worked under Toynbee at Chatham House in London, McNeill broke with Toynbee in his own work, seeing an interconnectedness among societies that didn’t exist in Toynbee’s writings.

A love of teaching and UChicago

At the University of Chicago, McNeill devoted himself to teaching in addition to his research. “Teaching is the most wonderful way to learn things,” he said in an interview. “You have to get up before a class at 10 o’clock the next morning and have something to say.” In 1983, he received the University’s Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.

McNeill helped design the History of Western Civilization Core sequence at the University in the late 1940s and played a major role in introducing the history of other world civilizations as key elements of the College’s curriculum in the 1950s and ‘60s. He had a deep love and respect for the University and its intellectual community, dedicating The Rise of the West to “the community of scholars constituting the University of Chicago.”

“My father loved the University of Chicago wholeheartedly, its traditions and its people. A good-natured argument was his favorite form of entertainment, and he felt his colleagues and students at the University provided that in full measure,” said his son John McNeill, a professor of history at Georgetown University.

After his retirement, McNeill and his wife moved to Connecticut, where he continued to write. He completed a biography of Toynbee in 1989 and wrote The Human Web: A Bird’s-Eye View of World History with John McNeill, published in 2003. In 2005, he published The Pursuit of Truth: A Historian’s Memoir.

In an essay for the American Historical Association, McNeill explained the importance of studying history. “Ignorance of history—that is, absent or defective collective memory—does deprive us of the best available guide for public action, especially in encounters with outsiders, whether the outsiders are another nation, another civilization or some special group within national borders.”

McNeill is survived by his four children and 11 grandchildren.

Alison Winter, historian of science, 1965-2016

Fri, 24 Jun 2016 13:25 -0500

Editor’s note: A memorial service for Alison Winter will be held Nov. 2 at 4 p.m. in Rockefeller Memorial Chapel

Alison Winter, a historian of science and medicine whose book on memory won the University of Chicago Press’s top honor, died Wednesday of a brain tumor. She was 50 years old.

Winter, AB’87, was a professor of history whose research often focused in areas of science and medicine that were unorthodox and less traveled. She explored how 19th-century mesmerism catalyzed efforts to define and demarcate science in Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain and the cultural and scientific history of human understanding of memory in Memory: Fragments of a Modern History, which won the UChicago Press’s Gordon J. Laing Prize in 2014.

She was dedicated to supporting the next generation of scholars.Prof. Robert Richards

Winter taught undergraduates in the history of medicine, film and gender studies, guided doctoral students in their dissertations, and mentored postdoctoral fellows at the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics. Students described her as a generous critic and strong advocate. Even after becoming ill, Winter continued to co-teach an undergraduate seminar in history of science via video chat – first from home and later from the hospital.

“She was dedicated to supporting the next generation of scholars,” said Robert Richards, the Morris Fishbein Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Science and Medicine. “She loved finding a wedge in an intellectual exchange and pushing it. But you could never get mad at her. She always had a sly smile.”

Winter first arrived at UChicago in 1983 as an undergraduate. Richards said Winter’s father, who taught mathematics at the University of Michigan, wanted her to major in science. She was interested in English literature. The compromise was the history of science, which quickly became Winter’s passion.

Winter received a master’s degree and doctorate from the University of Cambridge. It was there she met her husband Adrian Johns, who is the Allan Grant Maclear Professor of History at UChicago.

Winter’s dissertation on mesmerism became her first book Mesmerized, which the UChicago Press published in 1998. Alex Owen writing in the journal Victorian Studies described it as a tour de force that requires “a reevaluation of precisely what constituted ‘center’ and ‘margin’ during a period in which many Victorian intellectuals and public figures experimented with mesmerism.”

After Cambridge, Winter taught at the California Institute of Technology before returning to UChicago in 2001.

Winter was awarded fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim, Andrew W. Mellon and National Science foundations, contributing to the research for Memory. In the book, she explores how scientists grope for metaphors to explain such an elusive subject, and how those metaphors evolved to reflect changing technology—from memory as a filing cabinet to a reel of film available for playback.

Doctoral students of Winter said she had a unique ability to balance criticism and encouragement, asking key questions to guide research rather than direct it. Caitjan Gainty, AM’05, PhD’12, remembers pulling up rugs with Winter at her home in Hyde Park, discussing future intellectual projects and talking about Winter’s fascination with a light-therapy enthusiast who once owned the property.

“She had confidence in me as a scholar before I even understood what it meant to do that kind of work,” said Gainty, lecturer in the history of science, technology and medicine at King’s College London.

Winter is survived by Johns and their four children, David, Lizzie, Zoe, and Benjamin; her mother, Judy Swartz, and stepfathers David Ballou and Fred Swartz; her father, David Winter, and stepmother, Michele Weipert-Winter; and her brother, Jonathan Ballou.

A memorial service for Winter is planned for Autumn Quarter.

David Tod Roy, translator of Chinese literary classic, 1933-2016

Wed, 08 Jun 2016 12:35 -0500

Prof. David Tod Roy, best known for his exhaustive translation of a famous 16th-century Chinese novel, died May 29 at his home in Chicago from complications of ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. He was 83.

A professor emeritus in East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Roy spent three decades completing a five-volume translation of the Ming Dynasty classic Chin P’ing Mei (The Plum in the Golden Vase). Well known for its eroticism, the novel chronicles the life of a corrupt, middle-class merchant and his numerous sexual liaisons. Princeton University Press published the series over a period of 20 years, with the final volume, “The Dissolution,” completed in 2013.

“David worked on his translation with single-minded fixity,” said longtime colleague and friend Ed Shaughnessy, the Lorraine J. and Herrlee G. Creel Distinguished Service Professor in Early Chinese Studies. “It is looked upon as a monument to scholarship.”

Scholars praised Roy’s work for its masterful research, reflected in more than 4,400 endnotes that provide a window onto ordinary peoples’ lives, with meticulous descriptions of everything from dinner party banter to bribery schemes to funeral rites. One critic called it a “masterly rendering of a richly encyclopedic novel of Ming dynasty manners.” Another wrote: “Reading Roy’s translation is a remarkable experience. It ought to be done slowly, savoring the keen detail, the setups and payoffs of the plot, and the novel’s many traditional verses, which comment, often ironically, upon the selfish motives and squalid actions of its characters. Roy translates the verse with a fine, unmannered ear.”

Roy was born in Nanjing, China in 1933 to Presbyterian missionary parents. His father, Andrew Tod Roy, was a philosophy professor at what is now the University of Nanking. The family spent the Sino-Japanese War years (1938-1945) in Chengdu, the provincial capital of Sichuan, where they were subjected to frequent Japanese bombing raids. After some years in the United States, Roy returned to China in 1948, just as the Communist revolution was culminating. His parents enrolled him in the Shanghai American School, a boarding school, where Roy recalled taking his final exams as Communist forces marched into the city.

“He was a great brother, and we had some real adventures together,” said his younger brother, J. Stapleton Roy, who joined him at the school, which was promptly shut down with the Communist takeover of Shanghai. “All the Americans had left, but we stayed on,” he added. “We lived in a dormitory, cut off from our parents who were miles away in Nanjing.” Eventually the brothers were sent out of the country to complete high school in the United States. Their parents, adhering to their missionary convictions, stayed behind and were placed under house arrest and later expelled from China.

As a teen, Roy developed an obsession with the Chinese language and, with the help of tutors, learned to read and write it. He had heard about the Chin P’ing Mei, particularly its notorious pornographic passages, and went in search of a copy where the graphic sexual material had not been deleted, Roy said in a 2013 interview. At 16, he found a complete, 3,000-page Chinese edition in a used-book store and thus began his lifelong fascination with the work. Years later, as a scholar, Roy found that the Chin P’ing Mei borrowed so creatively from such a wide range of literature that he made a file card for each line of poetry, parallel prose and proverbial saying, creating an index containing tens of thousands of cards.

Roy earned his bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees at Harvard University, completing his PhD in History and Far Eastern Languages in 1965. During his undergraduate years, he spent a two-year stint in the U.S. Army that included service in Japan and Taiwan. Roy’s first teaching job was at Princeton, where he taught Chinese literature for four years and met and married his wife, Barbara Chew, in 1967. That same year, he accepted a position as associate professor of Chinese literature at the University of Chicago. During the 1980s, he began translating the Chin P’ing Mei, what Roy himself once called “an extraordinarily detailed description of a morally derelict and corrupt society.” He also taught the novel in his classes, inspiring generations of students to pursue the study of Chinese literature. His first volume, “The Gathering,” was published in 1993.

Roy’s single-mindedness toward his scholarship was matched only by his tireless acquisition of any and all books related to Chinese studies, colleagues said. His former student David Rolston recalled graduate seminars in Roy’s office seated around a table piled high with his newest purchases, often from overseas, that sometimes remained there for months before Roy catalogued and shelved them. “The piles would get so high that we had to sit very straight and tall in order to lay out the material we were working on or write our notes on top of them,” said Rolston, PhD’88, now an associate professor of Chinese language and literature at the University of Michigan.

Other students recalled the impact Roy had on their scholarship and life trajectory. “Having David Roy as my teacher transformed my life,” said Katherine Carlitz, PhD’78, who recently retired from the Asian Studies Center at the University of Pittsburgh. “I had never quite understood what being a serious scholar would mean before I was lucky enough to come and study with him. There was so much humor in our classes; we students retained forever the joy of scholarship as he felt it and taught it.”

The University of Notre Dame acquired the bulk of Roy’s Chinese-language collection, totaling more than 4,000 volumes, in 2013. His English-language Chinese studies books went to the University of Nanking, where his father had been a faculty member.

Roy is survived by his wife, Barbara Chew Roy, and by his younger brother, J. Stapleton Roy, who served as the U.S. ambassador to China from 1991-1995. A University memorial service is planned for late October.

John Eaton, composer and electronic music pioneer, 1935-2015

Wed, 09 Dec 2015 16:45 -0600

John Eaton, a pioneering composer known for his chamber operas and advances in electronic music, died Dec. 2 from a massive brain hemorrhage. Eaton, 80, was professor emeritus in music.

A 1990 MacArthur fellow, Eaton drew praise for his inventive style and sound—one critic dubbed him “the most interesting opera composer writing in America today.” He was especially known for small-ensemble operas in which instrumentalists joined the action, dancing and acting onstage alongside the vocalists.

“John Eaton was a composer unlike any other,” remembered his friend and UChicago colleague Shulamit Ran, the Andrew MacLeish Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in Music. In all his work, “his own, thoroughly personal voice always prevailed. Everything that he did had a deeply musical impulse to it—passionate and profoundly human.”

Eaton studied composition under Milton Babbitt and Roger Sessions at Princeton University, where he received his bachelor’s degree in 1957 and his MFA in 1959. Both “encouraged me to go my own way,” he recalled later.

Eaton’s compositions owe their distinctive sound to his use of microtones—notes the fall between the traditional 12 tones of the Western musical scale.

His exploration of microtonal music grew out of his experiences as a jazz pianist. Unlike the saxophonists with whom he performed, Eaton couldn’t “bend” notes to alter their pitch. “As a pianist, my notes were fixed,” Eaton explained to NewCity in January 2015.

To achieve the diversity of sounds he wanted, Eaton developed a novel technique: For his 1964 piece “Microtonal Fantasy,” a single pianist plays two pianos tuned a quarter-tone apart.

The result is what Eaton’s colleague and fellow composer Augusta Read Thomas describes as “unusual and personal harmonic fabrics of sound.” She added, “when I hear his work, I feel like I’ve entered into this unique, otherworldly place that he’s taking me on a beautiful adventure.”

Eaton’s search for a subtler and expressive keyboard led him to collaborate with Robert Moog, inventor of the famed Moog synthesizer. Together, the pair developed a sophisticated new synthesizer, which featured three 49-key keyboards. Each key was programmed to respond to five different motions, like the finger’s front and back position on each key or the pressure on the key when pushed.

When the Eaton-Moog Multiple-Touch-Sensitive Keyboard was unveiled in 1992, Eaton declared it “the world’s most sensitive instrument next to the human voice. Playing it is a kind of combination of playing a very sensitive stringed instrument and playing a keyboard instrument.” Eaton gave his invention its first live concert performance in Mandel Hall in May 1992 in a piece called “Genesis.”

That same concert also featured the world premiere of Peer Gynt, an intimate chamber opera. It was one of Eaton’s many operas inspired by literature or folklore, including Don Quixote, The Tempest, The Cry of Clytaemnestra and Myshkin, which was broadcast on PBS and received a Peabody Award. He also explored modern themes: In 1995, Eaton collaborated with UChicago colleague and acclaimed novelist Richard Stern on the libretto for the 1995 satirical opera Golk, which examines a “Candid Camera”-esque TV show.

To support the production of his work, Eaton founded the Pocket Opera Company in 1992. The nimble company featured only about a dozen freelance musicians and eschewed elaborate sets and costumes, giving them the freedom to perform almost anywhere. Eaton continued to lead the ensemble after retiring in 2001.

In retirement, Eaton also maintained close ties to the University. Most recently, he composed “The End Of It” for the 50th anniversary of the contemporary music ensemble Contempo. Eaton composed “The End Of It” with an awareness that it might be among his final works; shortly before its premiere, he told Ran that it meant more to him than any other work he had composed.

Family members recall Eaton as a man whose heart matched his intellect. His warm presence and twinkling wit made Eaton a favorite host among his friends, who dropped by to enjoy his expert cooking, as well as his company. Eaton also enjoyed reading classic literature, traveling to Rome and spending time with his beloved cat, Bobok.

“It seems almost incomprehensible to accept that he is no longer with us,” Ran said. “But his art will remain alive—through the huge repertoire of operas, song cycles, and much more, that he left as his legacy.”

Eaton is survived by his wife, Nelda Nelson-Eaton, and his children, Estela and Julian Eaton. A wake will be held Dec. 10 at the Eaton home in New Jersey. A memorial concert is planned for March 2016 in New York.

Amy Kass, inspirational teacher who treasured a humanistic education, 1940–2015

Thu, 27 Aug 2015 12:50 -0500

During a teaching career that spanned 34 years at the University of Chicago, Amy Kass designed courses that addressed both the enduring questions of human existence and the urgent questions facing today’s young people by helping them see the relevance of classic texts to their everyday lives.

Among these was the “Ethics of Everyday Life: Courtship” course, which she co-created with her husband, Leon Kass, SB’58, MD’62. In the course she encouraged students to explore “inarticulate longings” and discover the purposes and virtues of courtship, love, sex and marriage through texts by such writers as Homer, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Tolstoy, C.S. Lewis, Allan Bloom and even Miss Manners.

Amy Apfel Kass, AB'62, senior lecturer emerita in humanities, died on Aug. 19 at her home in Washington, D.C., after a 10-year battle with ovarian cancer and a short battle with leukemia. She was 74.

“Amy Kass was a wonderfully generous and engaged teacher of the humanities, who profoundly influenced and enriched the lives of several generations of students in the College,” said John W. Boyer, dean of the College and the Martin A. Ryerson Distinguished Service Professor of History. “Her contributions to the theory and practice of liberal education were manifold and outstanding. She left an extraordinary legacy of excellence and dedication to the highest educational ideals of the College.”

In an article published in the Wall Street Journal, Bret Stephens, AB'95, a Pulitzer-winning journalist, noted that Kass was one of the best teachers he ever had. “Mrs. Kass believed that at least one aim of a higher education is to provide students with a sextant of sorts, by which they might better discover what it is they should know about life, what they might hope for it and how they might go about getting it,” he wrote.

Born Amy Judith Apfel in 1940, Kass grew up in New York City and chose, against her parents' wishes, to attend the University of Chicago because the recruitment catalogue focused on ideas and contained no pictures. "But really what was distinctive about Chicago—it was a place where you didn’t have to apologize for being serious," she often said. She met her future husband on her first day on campus. Leon Kass, a student at what is now the Pritzker School of Medicine, happened to be on the Orientation Board, responsible for orienting new students. The two were married two years later, in 1961.

During a video interview in January 2014 with Bill Kristol, founder and editor of the Weekly Standard, Amy Kass spoke fondly of her experience at UChicago. “We spent the first three weeks discussing the Declaration of Independence,” she recalled. “And I was blown away. The conversations that it generated … really converted me to a way of thinking, a way of reading and a way of speaking,” she added.

After graduating from UChicago, Kass took a teaching job at a high school in Lincoln-Sudbury, Mass. She took time off in the summer of 1965, following the passage of the Voting Rights Act, to put her strong beliefs in civil rights into action. She and her husband traveled to Mississippi, where they spent a month mobilizing African Americans in rural Holmes County to register to vote, encouraging them to organize and defend their civil rights.

“Amy’s devotion to excellence in teaching was part of a larger moral vision that guided her throughout her life and shaped her character,” said Robert P. George, the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University, and the Herbert W. Vaughan fellow at the Witherspoon Institute. “At the core of that vision was a sense of the profound and equal dignity of the human person.”

Re-inventing the rituals of courtship

Kass joined the UChicago faculty in 1976 as a lecturer in the Humanities Collegiate Division. Her husband Leon also joined the faculty for what would be a long and distinguished tenure; he currently is the Addie Clark Harding Professor Emeritus of Social Thought and the College. Amy and Leon Kass co-founded the “Human Being and Citizen” Common Core course devoted to the questions, “what is an excellent human being and what is an excellent citizen?” Amy Kass also was a stalwart teacher and advisor in the Fundamentals: Issues and Texts undergraduate major.

“Amy was an inspirational teacher for students and staff, believing so vehemently as she did in the value of a humanistic education,” said David Bevington, the Phyllis Fay Horton Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus. “She was no less dear and wonderful as a human being and colleague.”

Nathan Tarcov, professor of social thought and political science, agreed. “Amy was a rare and beloved teacher who inspired her students not only to respect the great books she taught but to respect themselves and each other,” said Tarcov.

At UChicago, Kass and her husband learned from their observations and through conversations that many young people went along from one unsatisfactory relationship to the next, often becoming “jaded and embittered.”

“There was a lot of talk about the failure of marriage, the divorce culture, the problems of single parenthood,” said Leon Kass during an interview with the Weekly Standard’s Kristol. “But there was absolutely no discussion whatsoever about how you get married and how you go about finding and winning the right one with whom you could make a life. And there were no cultural norms, there were no teachings.”

The Kasses decided to address the problem, both in writing and teaching. In 2000, the efforts led to the creation of a course, “Ethics of Everyday Life: Courtship,” which was based on an anthology the couple edited, Wing to Wing, Oar to Oar: Readings on Courting and Marrying. The book promotes what they called a higher kind of sex education designed to prepare hearts and minds for romance leading to lasting marriage.

Through the book, the Kasses sought to inspire young people to rediscover the blessings of marriage by reading classic and modern works on the subject, and re-inventing new forms of courting based on improved respect between men and women.

“Amy tried to help her students realize that what they longed for—intellectually, spiritually, even romantically—but too often felt they were denied by modern life, was only denied to them as long as they failed to really understand their longings,” wrote journalist Yuval Levin, who earned his PhD from the Committee on Social Thought at UChicago. “They could come to better understand them through the study of great works of literature.”

In 1980, after only four years of teaching in the College, Amy Kass won a Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. In 2010, Kass received the Norman Maclean Faculty Award, and the University subsequently created the Leon and Amy Kass Odyssey Scholarship Fund.

“Amy Kass was keenly interested in young people’s development as thoughtful human beings,” said Ralph Lerner, the Benjamin Franklin Professor Emeritus in Social Thought and the College, who co-taught several courses with Kass. “Her welcoming manner and easy smile never got the better of her intellectual rigor. Her success as a teacher may be measured by her many College students who strove to adopt for themselves the standard she held up before them: that when it comes to thinking, half-done is not well done.”

Kass retired in June 2010, and she discussed Herman Melville's Moby-Dick in her last class. When summarizing her UChicago career, she wrote that her lifelong mission was to teach people to “read great books slowly and critically, to refine their ideas, to enlarge their sympathies, and to aspire to a richer life beyond self-centered quests for gain, fame or power.”

Kass served on the National Council on the Humanities for the National Endowment for the Humanities, as a consultant to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Corporation for National and Community Service, and as a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.

She authored numerous articles and edited anthologies on American autobiography, and on the idea and practice of philanthropy. In addition to Wing to Wing, Oar to Oar, she and her husband also produced the anthology, What So Proudly We Hail: The American Soul in Story, Speech, and Song. They also produced e-curricula on The Meaning of America and The American Calendar.

Amy Kass is survived by her husband of 54 years, Leon Kass; her daughters, Sarah Kass and Miriam R. Kass; son-in-law, Robert Hochman; her granddaughters, Polly, Hannah, Naomi and Abigail; and her siblings, Dr. Roberta J. Apfel, Dr. Franklin J. Apfel and David J. Apfel.

Pera Wirszup, longtime resident master and scholar of Russian, 1915-2015

Tue, 25 Aug 2015 17:05 -0500

Pera Wirszup, who along with husband Izaak was a longtime resident master at the former Woodward Court residence hall, died Aug. 20 in her Hyde Park home. A former lecturer in Russian at the University, she was 100.

The Wirszups served as resident masters from 1971 to 1985 and pioneered the tradition of bringing faculty and students together in a lecture program that drew hundreds and featured such notable figures as historian John Hope Franklin and Nobel-winning physicist Subramahnyan Chandrasekhar. That effort continues with the Izaak Wirszup Lecture Series, endowed by a former student, and held at the Max Palevsky Residential Commons.

“Pera and Izaak were an extraordinary and vibrant presence on the campus, and created a tremendous sense of community in Woodward Court and the campus itself,” said Kate Bensen, AB’80, who was a student worker at Woodward Court.

“They always had an open door, a hug and wonderful advice for anyone who needed it. Pera was a gifted cultivator of people, and even at the age of 100, had an enviable calendar of visits from friends and former students. It was a privilege to have her as a friend for nearly 40 years,” she said.

Izaak Wirszup, a professor of mathematics and a founder of the University of Chicago School Mathematics Project, died in 2008.

'MAGNIFICENT EXAMPLES OF KINDNESS AND GENEROSITY'

Pera Poswianksi was born in Wilno, Poland (present-day Vilnius, Lithuania). Her family owned a textile manufacturing business and were part of the vibrant Jewish community in the city.

She and Izaak were survivors of the Holocaust. Most of their families died following Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939. Both Pera and Izaak lost their spouses but met again after the war and married, with Izaak adopting Pera’s daughter Marina.

“She utilized her resourcefulness, courage and intelligence to survive the Holocaust. Her grace and guidance influenced countless students,” Marina Tatar said.

Together, they made their way to Paris, where Wirszup worked before being invited to join Chicago's math department in 1949.

“It is amazing that Izaak and Pera, after all that they endured during the second World War, could be such magnificent examples of kindness and generosity,” said Robert Fefferman, the Max Mason Distinguished Service Professor in Mathematics.

“Through a most remarkable collaboration, they greatly improved the quality of life on our campus for generations of students and colleagues alike,” he added.

Pera Wirszup found a job with Peck & Peck, a women’s clothing store, and eventually rose to a management position and was invited to speak about her success at a national convention held in New York.

After leaving Peck & Peck, she joined the Slavic Languages and Literatures department at UChicago in 1980 as a lecturer in conversational Russian, one of six languages she spoke. She introduced the students to the classics of Russian literature. She continued teaching Russian until 1992.

In addition to daughter Marina, Wirszup is survived by three granddaughters and six great-grandsons.

Services will be at noon Wednesday at The Chapel, 8851 Skokie Blvd., Skokie. Memorials may be made to the Izaak and Pera Wirszup Mathematics Fellowship Fund, Gift Administration, 5235 S. Harper Ave., fourth floor, Chicago, IL 60615.

Norman W. Ingham, scholar of medieval Slavic literature, 1934-2015

Mon, 01 Jun 2015 14:45 -0500

Prof. Emeritus Norman W. Ingham, a meticulous and erudite scholar of medieval Slavic literature, died April 27 in Wilbraham, Mass. He was 80.

Ingham’s expertise spanned languages and time periods: He spoke Polish, Russian, Czech, Spanish, English, French, Italian, Old Church Slavonic and Greek, and studied 18-century Russian literature as well as early Slavic literature and folklore. He also wrote extensively on the works of Gogl, Turgenev and Tolstoy.

“He was broadly and deeply educated,” remembered his friend and colleague Valentina Pichugin, senior lecturer in Slavic Languages and Literatures.

Born in Granby, Mass. on Dec. 31, 1934, Ingham never lost his love of New England. Throughout his life, he looked forward to summers at his house in Massachusetts.

“I’m going home,” he would tell friends and colleagues in Chicago at the end of each school year.

Ingham received his BA from Middlebury College in 1957. He went on to study at the University of Michigan, where he received an MA in 1959, and Harvard, where he earned a PhD in 1963. During his graduate training, Ingham studied abroad at Leningrad State University, the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences and the Charles University in Prague.

After stints at Harvard and Indiana University, Ingham joined the University of Chicago faculty in 1971. During his time at UChicago, he edited monographs including The Church and Religious Culture in Old Rus’ and authored E.T.A. Hoffman’s Reception in Russia, as well as numerous journal articles. Ingham retired in 2006.

He made a lasting impact on his field as the organizer for nearly two decades of the Midwest Medieval Slavic Workshop, which continues today. Ingham insisted on cordial but rigorous discussion, resulting in debates between participants that Pichugin described as “pure intellectual bliss.”

In his own appearances at the workshop, Ingham was known to recite long sections of Slavic literature from memory—and end his presentations exactly on time without ever glancing at the clock.

As a teacher, Ingham balanced his high expectations with warmth and humanity, even taking time to work with struggling students outside of class until they mastered the material.

His former student Sonia Ketchian remembered Ingham was “magnificently organized as he presented lectures with clarity, precision and relevant humor, while remaining ever attentive to student reaction and participation. Norman truly and actively encouraged independent thinking from his students. Writing a paper for him was a joy because the student could be certain of careful attention, objective evaluation and constructive corrections,” she wrote in an email.

Dryly witty and impeccably polite, Ingham was “an ideal colleague,” according to Pichugin. He made special efforts to welcome new colleagues, inviting them to his regular table in the Quadrangle Club for lunch.

In his spare time, Ingham developed a passion for genealogy and wrote a book on his family’s history. He also enjoyed watching sports and old movies, collecting stamps and Harry Potter memorabilia, and listening to opera.

Ingham is survived by two nieces, Patricia Gelinas and Judith Ingham; and five nephews, Lewis, Bill, Earl, Richard and Larry Ingham. Services have been held.

Anthony C. Yu, translator and scholar of religion and literature, 1938-2015

Mon, 18 May 2015 13:30 -0500

Anthony C. Yu, a scholar of religion and literature best known for his landmark translation of the Chinese epic The Journey to the West, died May 12 after a brief illness. He was 76.

Yu, the Carl Darling Buck Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the Humanities and the Divinity School, introduced a comparative approach to the study of religion and literature that drew on both Eastern and Western traditions. Over his distinguished career, he made contributions on figures as wide-ranging as Aeschylus, Dante, Milton and William Faulkner. His work engages Chinese religions as well as classic texts of Christianity, Buddhism and Hinduism.

“Professor Anthony C. Yu was an outstanding scholar, whose work was marked by uncommon erudition, range of reference and interpretive sophistication. He embodied the highest virtues of the University of Chicago, his alma mater and his academic home as a professor for 46 years, with an appointment spanning five departments of the University. Tony was also a person of inimitable elegance, dignity, passion and the highest standards for everything he did,” said Margaret M. Mitchell, the Shailer Mathews Professor of New Testament and Early Christian Literature and dean of the Divinity School.

Yu was born on Oct. 6, 1938 in Hong Kong. The outbreak of World War II forced his family to flee to mainland China in 1941. To distract him from the fear and danger of the conflict, Yu’s grandfather began to tell him fantastical stories of a wise monk and his companions Monkey and Pig.

These stories were drawn from Journey to the West, a 16th-century novel that is considered a classic in China. The novel follows the monk’s adventures as he travels across China in search of Buddhist scriptures from India.

“I was crazy about the stories and would badger my grandpa all the time, whether we would be in air-raid shelters or fleeing from some terrible dangers,” recalled Yu.

Yu, PhD’69, rediscovered Journey to the West as a young scholar at the University of Chicago. At the time, only one abridged English edition was available.

Yu’s colleagues Herrlee Creel in East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and Joseph Mitsuo Kitagawa, then dean of the Divinity School, encouraged him to undertake a fresh translation.

With more than 100 chapters containing both prose and verse, as well as complex religious and literary allusions, Journey to the West posed enormous challenges to a modern translator. Yu chased down every poem, song and piece of scripture referenced in the sprawling novel. Yet he also wanted to balance scholarly thoroughness with a text that would appeal to a broad audience.

“The most important thing is to make the text available,” he told the University of Chicago Chronicle.

Yu’s translation of Journey to the West appeared to wide acclaim in 1983. “While his translation does full justice to the adventure, lyricism and buffoonery of The Journey to the West, it is completely sensitive to the spiritual content of the text as well,” David Lattimore wrote in The New York Times. The book received the Laing Prize from the University of Chicago Press in 1984.

But Yu still wasn’t done with Journey to the West: He published an abridged translation, The Monkey and the Monk in 2006. He also updated and revised the unabridged text. A second edition of Journey to the West appeared in 2012.

Edward Shaughnessy, the Lorraine J. and Herrlee G. Creel Distinguished Service Professor in Early Chinese Studies and the College, taught The Monkey and the Monk in his Readings and World Literature Core course. Yu visited the class and delighted students with the story of the novel and its translation.

“Tony was not only a great translator of literature, but someone who personified the translation of culture in his urbanity and in his ability to speak with everyone,” Shaughnessy said.

'man of wide reading and deep insight'

Yu’s expertise went far beyond Journey to the West and Chinese literature. His undergraduate studies at Houghton College and his graduate training at the University of Chicago gave him command of the Western classics as well.

“He was really a comparativist in the truest sense, and a man of wide reading and deep insight,” said Bruce Lincoln, the Caroline E. Haskell Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions in the Divinity School.

The field of religion and literature perfectly suited Yu’s far-reaching interests and expertise. He wrote influential articles arguing for the importance of studying religion and literature together.

“He theorized [the study of religion and literature] as well as exemplified it,” said Wendy Doniger, the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions in the Divinity School.

Doniger, who co-taught a course on the mythology of evil with Yu, recalled an agile and energetic teacher who rarely even glanced at his prepared notes.

“Studying with him was a tremendous privilege,” said Yu’s former student Eric Ziolkowski, who now teaches at Lafayette College. “He exuded a passion and an intensity that were contagious to anyone fortunate enough to be his student.”

Yu was a demanding teacher, but he paired his high expectations with generosity and attentiveness. Yu regularly hosted dinners at his home and invited students to attend the opera or symphony. He maintained warm relationships with many of his advisees long after they graduated.

As a colleague, Yu was “a warm presence in the life of the Divinity School, even after his retirement. He was invariably the first to congratulate colleagues on their scholarly achievements. Indeed, he took a genuine interest in our work,” said Paul Mendes-Flohr, the Dorothy Grant Maclear Professor of Modern Jewish History and Thought in the Divinity School. “He was an embodiment of the collegial and academic ethos of the Divinity School.”

Yu was an elected member of the American Academy of the Arts & Sciences, the American Council of Learned Societies and Academia Sinica. Among other appointments he was a board member of the Modern Language Association, and he received Guggenheim, ACLS, Mellon and other prestigious fellowships to support his research.

A pianist and lover of classical music, Yu and his wife Priscilla regularly attended the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Lyric Opera. Yu organized small chamber ensembles with his colleagues at the University.

Friends and colleagues recalled Yu’s excellent taste in wine and fondness for gourmet cooking. “That was one of the great pleasures of knowing Tony—you ate very well,” Doniger said. They also remembered him as a devoted husband and father.

For his student Ziolkowski, Yu “was living proof that beneath every truly great humanist is a great human being.”

Yu is survived by his wife Priscilla and son Christopher. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the Divinity School and Division of the Humanities at the University of Chicago. A University memorial service will be held on Sunday, June 14 at 3 p.m. in Bond Chapel.

Sir Christopher Bayly, visiting scholar of South Asian history, 1945-2015

Wed, 22 Apr 2015 10:50 -0500

Sir Christopher Bayly, the Indian Ministry of Culture Vivekananda Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago and one of the world’s foremost scholars on South Asian and British imperial history, died suddenly on April 19 in Chicago. Bayly was the Vere Harmsworth Professor Emeritus at Cambridge University.

Bayly was in the second term of his visiting appointment at UChicago, where he was teaching a course on India in world history and preparing to present the Vivekananda public lecture next month. Last year, during his first term at the University, he delivered a widely attended lecture titled “Making Hinduism a ‘World Religion’: Before and After Swami Vivekananda.”

In a message to faculty, Martha Roth, dean of the Division of the Humanities, remembered Bayly as a friend and colleague to many at the University. “His presence on campus as a superb scholar and generous friend will be missed,” she wrote.

Bayly held numerous visiting appointments in the United States and Europe throughout his distinguished career. In addition to a Knight Bachelor awarded by Queen Elizabeth in 2007 “for services to history outside Europe,” he was honored by academic societies and institutions, including the British Academy, the Royal Historical Society, the Academia Europaea, the Royal Society of Literature, the Royal Asiatic Society and the British Museum. In 2005 he received the Wolfson Prize for Lifetime Achievement in History.

Ulrike Stark, Bayly’s colleague in South Asian Languages and Civilizations, said the department was deeply saddened by the loss.

“In the relatively short time that Prof. Christopher Bayly was with us, he not only became a mainstay and important interlocutor in our community of South Asianists and historians on campus, but also a much esteemed and cherished colleague, and indeed, a dear friend to the members of the SALC department and beyond. And he was a wonderful and inspiring teacher, tremendously generous with his time and knowledge,” said Stark, professor and chair of South Asian Languages and Civilizations.

Memorial service details are not yet available.

Donald Levine, sociologist and former dean of the College, 1931-2015

Thu, 09 Apr 2015 09:20 -0500

Whether he was teaching his students about sociology through martial arts or leading them to the Point during the University’s annual Kuvia celebration, Prof. Donald Levine believed in education without boundaries.

“[T]he intense communication that flourishes here occurs well beyond the classroom,” Levine told entering College students at Opening Convocation in 1982. In the years to come, he said, they would learn everywhere: “in the residence halls, at the supermarket, on the playing fields, inside the coffeehouses and on the streets of Hyde Park.”

Levine, the Peter B. Ritzma Professor Emeritus of Sociology, died on April 4 after a long illness. He was 83.

An adventurous and open-minded intellectual, Levine, AB’50, AM’57, PhD’57, made wide-ranging contributions to the field of sociology, alongside his lasting impact on the University as dean of the College from 1982-87.

John W. Boyer, current dean of the College, said Levine served “brilliantly” in that position.

“As an alumnus of the College and later as a prominent faculty leader, Don was a strong and passionate advocate for student rights and student welfare, and a firm believer in the power and efficacy of general education as a defining principle of the College’s educational programs,” Boyer said.

“I’m on very good terms with the dean”

As dean, Levine reaffirmed the importance of the College’s liberal arts education. “[E]ven from a practical point of view of occupational success in later life, the best thing you can do is acquire a wide range of intellectual abilities,” he told the Chicago Sun-Times in 1982.

He used his deanship to draw attention to the non-academic aspects of College life as well. Levine worked to expand the academic advising program, strengthen the residential house system and encourage students to venture outside Hyde Park. He attracted national attention for his decision to change the school’s official song to replace “sons” and “men” with gender-inclusive terms like “children” and “us.”

With several colleagues, he created the College’s annual wintertime festival, Kuviasungnerk/Kangeiko, which began in 1983. The celebration was, in many ways, a reflection of Levine’s seemingly indefatigable good humor. “You can’t change the weather, but you can change your perception of it,” Levine said. “We wanted to blast away winter doldrums with some fun.”

Kuvia also honored Levine’s belief that education should cultivate both body and mind. A fourth-degree black belt in Aikido, Levine taught a College course that incorporated sociological theories of conflict resolution along with a weekly three-hour “lab” focused on the theory and practice of the Japanese martial art.

Levine, then dean of the College, knew the course seemed unconventional to some, but “I’m on very good terms with the dean of the College, you see,” he said.

Intellectual dialogue

In his own undergraduate days, Levine met the renowned philosopher Richard McKeon, whose work on pluralism shaped Levine’s open-minded approach to sociology and social theory.

Over his long career, Levine published several works that are now considered landmarks of sociology. His “masterpiece,” according to former student Charles Camic, was Visions of the Sociological Tradition, published by the University of Chicago Press in 1995.

In that book, Levine traced the intellectual genealogy of the social sciences and argued that different traditions of social thought could productively inform one another. “It’s a brilliant analysis of theories and intellectual traditions, but also a very thoughtful effort to bring them into intellectual dialogue with one another,” said Camic, PhD’79, now a professor of sociology at Northwestern University. “The beauty with which it’s argued and the depth of his knowledge about these different intellectual traditions are astounding.”

Levine was also influential in promoting the work of German sociologist Georg Simmel and translated several of Simmel’s works into English. “He brought Simmel to awareness in the U.S.,” said Douglas Mitchell, a longtime editor at the University of Chicago Press, who worked with Levine throughout his career.

As a young scholar, Levine spent several years doing fieldwork in Ethiopia, which resulted in his first book, Wax and Gold: Tradition and Innovation in Ethiopian Culture. In 2004, Andreas Eshete, the president of Addis Ababa University, called Wax and Gold “an Ethiopian classic.”

Levine remained interested in Ethiopia throughout his life and served as an advisor on Ethiopia to the U.S. Senate, Department of State and other federal agencies. In 1999, he published Greater Ethiopia: The Evolution of a Multiethnic Society, an interdisciplinary study of Ethiopian history.

Levine used his experiences as dean of the College to inform his 2006 book, Powers of the Mind: The Reinvention of Liberal Learning in America, in which he explored the history of undergraduate education at UChicago and proposed ways to keep liberal education relevant in the modern world. “That’s one I think people will keep coming back to, more and more,” said Levine’s former student Dan Silver, PhD’08, now a professor at the University of Toronto.

Ethiopia, martial arts, intellectual history, pedagogy—the breadth of Levine’s interest and his openness to new ideas set him apart, colleagues and students say. “He was a great believer in different approaches in the hope that each could be enriched by the others,” Camic said. “I think it also came out of a deeper moral belief in the importance of human dialogue across all lines.”

Levine brought that spirit to his work as a teacher. Rigorous but never doctrinaire, Levine encouraged students to follow their own interests wherever they led. “His goal as a teacher was to produce students from whom he could learn later,” Silver said.

At the end of his life, Levine was at work on a book on the role of dialogue in social theory, according to his longtime friend and UChicago PhD student Jonathan Baskin. Baskin was surprised that Levine was trying to finish another book during his illness, but quickly realized the project brought Levine joy in his last months. “For me, it was inspiring to see someone who really did what he loved to the end,” Baskin said.

An embodiment of the UChicago spirit

Levine’s colleagues and collaborators remember him for his generosity, thoughtfulness and positive outlook. Despite his many commitments, he was never too busy to read a former student’s work or send an email of praise. Mitchell remembers Levine making a surprise appearance at his most recent birthday party, flowers, card and balloons in hand—a memory that, for Mitchell, captures both Levine’s kindness and his game-for-anything sense of spontaneity.

“He lived in a way that expressed his commitment and love for ideas,” Baskin said. “He was one of the embodiments of the University of Chicago spirit for me. He expressed so many of its best qualities.”

Donald Levine is survived by his wife, Ruth Levine; his children, Rachel Levine, William Levine and Theodore Levine; and his grandchildren, Natanyel Bohm-Levine, Zoe Melnick and Ari Melnick.

A memorial service will be held on April 9, 1 p.m. at KAM Isaiah Israel Congregation, 1100 E. Hyde Park Blvd. Shiva will be at the Levine residence on April 9 and 11, from 6 to 8:30 p.m. with a minyan at 7 p.m. both nights. Memorial contributions may be made to the Nature Conservancy or the Jacob J. Weinstein Fund of KAM Isaiah Israel.

Harry Hoffner, scholar of ancient Near East, 1934-2015

Wed, 01 Apr 2015 10:25 -0500

Harry Hoffner, one of the founders of the Chicago Hittite Dictionary and a leading expert on the ancient Near East, died suddenly on March 10 in South Carolina. He was 80.

Hoffner, who retired in 2000, was the John A. Wilson Professor Emeritus of Hittitology at the University of Chicago.

With Hans Gustav Güterbock, Hoffner co-founded the Chicago Hittite Dictionary in 1976. The project, which continues at the Oriental Institute today, is a long-term effort to document the language of the Hittites, a people who lived in ancient Anatolia (present-day Turkey).

Gil Stein, director of the Oriental Institute, said Hoffner was “one of the leading figures in the study of the Hittite language.”

“His work as editor of the Chicago Hittite Dictionary laid the foundations for the most important research tool for scholars studying the world’s oldest written Indo-European language. Scholars of linguistics and of the ancient Near East will always be in debt to him for his many contributions to these fields,” Stein added.

In addition to his work on the Chicago Hittite Dictionary, Hoffner authored several foundational books on the Hittite language and culture: Alimenta Hethaeorum, a study of Hittite food production; The Laws of the Hittites: A Critical Edition; and A Grammar of the Hittite Language, which his colleague Theo van den Hout described as “a landmark publication” for the field.

Van den Hout, who succeeded Hoffner as director of the Chicago Hittite Dictionary, remembered Hoffner as a careful and devoted scholar who held himself to the highest academic standards. As a colleague, Hoffner was kind and attentive, van den Hout said—he remembered Hoffner and his wife planning an outing to the Brookfield Zoo with van den Hout and his young children when they first arrived in the United States.

Hoffner received his BA from Princeton University in 1956 and a Master of Theology from Dallas Theological Seminary in 1960. He held an MA and PhD in Ancient Mediterranean Studies from Brandeis University.

In retirement, Hoffner took wintertime visits to South Carolina, where he enjoyed walks and bike rides on the beach. A deeply religious man, Hoffner taught Bible study classes and was a member of the choir at College Church in Wheaton for two decades.

Hoffner is survived by his wife of 57 years, Winifred; their three children, David, Karen and Lee; and two grandchildren, Samantha and Maija.

Robert M. Grant, influential historian of ancient Christianity, 1917-2014

Tue, 17 Jun 2014 11:09 -0500

Robert McQueen Grant, whose incisive studies of ancient Christianity made him one of his field’s most influential scholars, died June 10 at his home in Hyde Park. He was 96.

Grant was the Carl Darling Buck Professor Emeritus of New Testament and Early Christian Literature at the University of Chicago Divinity School, where he taught from 1953 until his retirement in 1988.

A prolific and widely respected theologian, Grant wrote more than 30 books and numerous articles over a career that spanned more than six decades.

Grant’s scholarship was characterized by “philological exactness, a deep knowledge of the ancient world, and philosophical and theological finesse, together with a tight prose style and dry wit,” said Margaret M. Mitchell, dean of the Divinity School and the Shailer Matthews Professor of New Testament and Early Christian Literature. “He was an excellent scholar and an unforgettable human being."

Grant’s landmark works, including The Letter and the Spirit, The Earliest Lives of Jesus, and Augustus to Constantine: The Rise and Triumph of Christianity in the Roman World, anticipated many trends in New Testament scholarship by emphasizing social history and situating early Christian literary culture within the context of the wider Greco-Roman world.

Grant summarized his approach to biblical interpretation at an address before the American Academy of Religion in 1968 when he argued that “the New Testament should not, and indeed, cannot be studied apart from the time and the space in which the Christian movement began,” Grant said. “I claim that in teaching early Christianity, we must teach it as history.”

“Robert Grant was unique,” said David Tracy, the Andrew Thomas Greeley and Grace McNichols Greeley Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Catholic Studies in the Divinity School. “No other 21st-century historian of early Christianity possessed his range of interests, his lucidity of prose and his exactitude in historical facts. His influence will remain immense.”

Grant was a demanding teacher who inspired enduring loyalty from his students. “He trained a generation of very great Patristics scholars,” said Grant’s colleague and friend Bernard McGinn, the Naomi Shenstone Donnelley Professor Emeritus in the Divinity School. “He was a great scholar who published extensively, but he was also a very great teacher who shaped the discipline through his students and his writings.”

Grant was born on Nov. 25, 1917 in Evanston, Ill. Theology was a family affair for the Grants—his father, Frederick C. Grant, was also a renowned Biblical scholar who spent much of his career as a professor of Biblical theology at the Union Theological Seminary in New York. Grant’s father-in-law, Douglas Horton, was a leader in the ecumenical movement and served on the faculty of the Harvard Divinity School.

Grant went on to receive a BA with distinction from Northwestern University, a Bachelor of Divinity from Union Theological Seminary, and a master's and doctorate from Harvard University. He was an ordained minister in the Protestant Episcopal Church.

Before coming to UChicago, he taught in the School of Theology at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn. While at UChicago, he published such major works as Miracle and Natural Law in Graeco-Roman and Early Christian Thought; Eusebius as Church Historian; Greek Apologists of the Second Century; Heresy and Criticism; Irenaeus of Lyons; and Paul in the Roman World: the Conflict at Corinth.

Alongside his interest in New Testament studies, Grant also undertook significant research on German U-boats, a topic that had fascinated him since childhood. He published several books about U-boats and their activities, including U-Boats Destroyed: The Effects of Anti-Submarine Warfare 1914-1918 and, most recently, U-Boat Hunters: Code Breakers, Divers and the Defeat of the U-Boats 1914-1918.

Over his extended career, Grant received Fulbright and Guggenheim fellowships, and held many honors, memberships and leadership roles in scholarly societies. He was president of the Society of Biblical Literature, the Chicago Society for Biblical Research, American Society of Church History and the North American Patristics Society. Grant was elected to the American Academy of Art and Sciences in 1981.

Grant is survived by his wife, Peggy (née Margaret Huntington Horton), their children, Douglas, Peter, Jim and Susan; six grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. Services will be private. A memorial will be held in September at St. Paul and the Redeemer Church in Hyde Park, with details to be announced.

Ted Cohen, philosopher who found the extraordinary in the ordinary, 1939-2014

Tue, 18 Mar 2014 16:15 -0500

Update: A memorial service will be held for Prof. Ted Cohen at 5 p.m. April 12 at the Quadrangle Club, 1155 E. 57th St.

Ted Cohen, a philosopher whose agile intellect and wry humor made him a UChicago campus legend, died Friday after a brief hospitalization. He was 74.

Over a career that spanned more than 50 years, Cohen, professor in philosophy and the College, turned his eye to a vast range of subjects that included jokes, baseball, television, photography, painting and sculpture, as well as the philosophy of language and formal logic.

“He was proud of bringing philosophy to everything he looked at,” said his daughter Shoshanna Cohen.

While some philosophers aim to construct large-scale theories, others “look with a very fine, acute eye at specific phenomena and work from the example outwards, beginning with the ordinary and exposing the extraordinary within it,” said Cohen’s longtime friend and colleague Josef Stern. “Ted was that kind of philosopher.”

Endlessly curious, “if he was working on Velasquez one day, he could be working on metaphor the next,” said fellow friend and collaborator Joel Snyder, professor in art history and the College.

TAKING HUMOR SERIOUSLY

Many remember Cohen, AB’62, for his legendary wit. But humor was more than a hallmark of his personality—it was also the subject of some of Cohen’s major contributions to his field.

Indeed, “he’s one of the first philosophers who took jokes seriously,” said Stern, the William H. Colvin Professor of Philosophy and director of the Chicago Center for Jewish Studies.

Cohen’s 1999 book, Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters, offered a lively and accessible take on how and why jokes work.

Liberally sprinkled with some of Cohen’s favorite groaners (“What do Alexander the Great and Winnie the Pooh have in common? They have the same middle name”), Jokes examines the role of humor in creating intimacy and a sense of community.

“I need reassurance that this something inside of me, the something that is tickled by a joke, is indeed something that constitutes an element of my humanity,” he wrote. “I discover something of what it is to be a human being by finding this thing in me, and then having it echoed in you, another human being.

“Of course I want you to like the one about Winnie the Pooh…But I also need you to like it, because in your liking I receive a confirmation of my own liking.”

In addition to his work on humor, Cohen also made major contributions to the study of metaphor. His 2008 book Thinking of Others: On the Talent for Metaphor synthesized his years of work on the topic, arguing that the ability to think of one thing as another is an essential human capacity that makes sound moral judgment possible.

philosopher, writer, teacher

Cohen was widely praised for his elegant, precise and engaging writing style. He won the Pushcart Prize—a literary honor—in 1991 for his essay “There are No Ties at First Base.”

“He was as much a writer as he was a philosopher,” said his wife Andy Austin Cohen.

Cohen was the president of the American Philosophical Association from 2006-2007 and the American Society for Aesthetics from 1997-1998, among many other professional honors. He chaired the Department of Philosophy from 1974-1979.

He was also a dedicated teacher who won the Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 1983.

Amy Chou, AB’12, remembered Cohen as “a vibrant presence” in the classroom who was as quick to tell a story as he was to lavish praise on the work of his colleagues. Chou remembered arriving to class early in hopes of chatting with Cohen as he smoked on the steps of Harper. “I would always emerge from those conversations covered in ash,” she recalled. “But it was totally worth it.”

Cohen also made his mark as the longtime moderator of the University’s famed Latke-Hamantash Debate—though not an impartial one. “The hamantash is a very, very good thing of its kind,” he argued in the 1976 debate. “The latke, however, is a perfect thing. Now that I’ve laid the conclusion out, perhaps its transparent correctness is already evident to you.”

He was also a longtime participant in the Revels, the faculty-produced satirical revue.

In his leisure time, Cohen enjoyed playing pool at the Quadrangle Club, where in recent years he enjoyed a weekly lunch with his daughter Shoshannah, who works in the Office of the University Registrar.

The avid White Sox fan was also a talented jazz drummer and piano player who enjoyed music of all kinds. He loved movies and kept a cardboard cutout of John Wayne in the entryway to his Hyde Park home.

Cohen was raised in the small farming community of Hume, Ill. He holds a bachelor’s degree from UChicago and a PhD from Harvard University, where he studied under the legendary philosopher Stanley Cavell.

Cohen is survived by his wife Andy Austin Cohen, his son Amos Cohen and grandson Asher Cohen, his daughter Shoshannah Cohen and son-in-law Elmer Almachar, his brother Stephen Cohen, and his aunt, Peg Kay.

The family will sit shiva on Friday, March 21 from 4 p.m. to sundown at Cohen’s home in Hyde Park. A memorial service will be held April 12 at the Quadrangle Club. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the American Civil Liberties Union.

Alumnus George Anastaplo, 88, taught for nearly six decades at Graham School

Fri, 07 Mar 2014 14:54 -0600

George Anastaplo, AB’48, JD’51, PhD’64, who sacrificed a promising legal career by defending his First Amendment rights before the McCarthy-era Illinois Bar and eventually the U.S. Supreme Court, died Feb. 14 after teaching nearly six decades in the University of Chicago Graham School of Continuing Liberal and Professional Studies.

The son of Greek immigrants who operated a restaurant in Carterville, Ill., Anastaplo pursued his bachelor and law degrees from the University of Chicago after serving in the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II, navigating B-17 and B-29 bombers.

Anastaplo was denied admission to the Illinois Bar in 1950 after refusing on principle to answer whether he was a member of the Communist party—calling questions about political affiliation and religion irrelevant. The Committee on Character and Fitness, which routinely interviewed Bar applicants, also asked if Communist Party members should be allowed to practice law in Illinois.

“I should think so,” replied Anastaplo, who then went on in his characteristically polite yet pithy manner to defend the right of revolution, if justified, as established in the Declaration of Independence.

Anastaplo argued his own case before the Illinois and U.S. Supreme Court. He lost the federal case in 1961 by a 5-4 decision. Justice Hugo Black, comparing Anastaplo to Clarence Darrow and other brave lawyers, wrote a dissenting opinion famously asserting, “We must not be afraid to be free.”

With his unblemished record, Black wrote, “the very most that can fairly be said against Anastaplo’s position in this entire matter is that he took too much of the responsibility of preserving that freedom upon himself.”

As the case went through appeals, Anastaplo worked on his doctorate in the Committee on Social Thought at the University under the guidance of mentor Leo Strauss. In 1957, he joined the Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults faculty and continued to teach through December 2013. He also taught at Dominican University (then Rosary College), and later at the Loyola University School of Law, frequently riding his bike from Hyde Park to Loyola until he was nearly 80. He also authored scores of books and hundreds of articles on topics ranging from political science to philosophy to religion to classic literature.

Anastaplo was the “heart and soul” of the Basic Program, said former chair Cynthia Rutz. “He inspired everyone around him—students and fellow faculty alike—to always continue learning and never be afraid to pose difficult questions,” she said. She noted that longtime Hyde Park alderman Leon Despres, PhB’27, JD’29, perfectly dubbed Anastaplo the “Socrates of Chicago” for his tireless role of good-natured gadfly, poking and prodding ideas, whether he was in a courtroom, classroom or elsewhere.

Anastaplo’s unwavering commitment to free thought earned him many admirers. In 2005, he was the inaugural recipient of the Graham School’s Excellence in Teaching Award, and received the school’s Distinguished Service Award in 2012. But the Bar interview wasn’t the only time his devotion to the ideal rendered him an outsider.

Keith Cleveland, AB’64, AM’69, JD’79, also a former chair of the Basic Program who taught with Anastaplo for 45 years, recalled that Anastaplo was kicked out of Russia in 1960, while driving through Europe on vacation with his family after defending a group of fellow tourists handing out American literature. He also was expelled from Greece in 1968, for asking some embarrassing questions of the right-wing military junta in power. Recalling these events and Anastaplo’s case against the Illinois Bar, political scientist C. Herman Pritchett wrote: “As W. C. Fields might have said, any man who is kicked out of Russia, Greece and the Illinois Bar can’t be all bad.”

Although Anastaplo never became a lawyer, his legal training served him well in academia, Cleveland said. “George brought his extraordinary cross-examination skills to the classroom,” he said, “not in a hostile manner, but to open up and explore ideas and pursue them in an interesting and intelligent way.”

Larry Arnhart, AM’73, PhD’77, a former student of Anastaplo’s who teaches political science at Northern Illinois University, said he tries to live up to his mentor’s patient intellectual prodding at the podium.

“Sometimes, you ask a provocative question and there’s silence,” Arnhart said. “George always said if students don’t respond, don’t just resume lecturing and let students get away with being so passive. Wait, and wait some more until someone shares their thoughts. Soon enough, students discover that a class organized around stimulating discussion is more interesting,” he said.

Michael Allocca, current chair of the Basic Program, said Anastaplo had a “hard-core” following of people who would sign up for every course he taught, and he was known for never having missed a session.

“During the last week of autumn semester in December, when he called to say he wouldn’t be well enough to make it in,” Allocca said, “he asked if we could set up a phone in the classroom so that he could lead the discussion from home via telephone.”

Miriam Redleaf, Anastaplo’s daughter and a professor of otolaryngology at the University of Illinois College of Medicine, said his family wasn’t surprised by his efforts to finish the semester despite prostate cancer that had spread to his bones.

“He was proud of teaching all the way till the end,” Redleaf said. “He never considered missing a class.”

Anastaplo is survived by his wife of more than 65 years, Sara Prince Anastaplo; his daughters, Helen Newlin, Miriam Redleaf and Theodora Anastaplo; his son, George Malcolm Davidson Anastaplo; and eight grandchildren. A memorial service will be held at Bond Chapel on the University of Chicago campus on Friday, June 6. More information about the memorial service will be published on this website when it becomes available.

In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to The George Anastaplo Basic Program Lecturer Fund, Graham School of Continuing Liberal and Professional Studies, the University of Chicago, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL. 60637.

Lindy Bergman, longtime supporter of higher education and the arts, 1918-2014

Mon, 20 Jan 2014 13:26 -0600

A lifelong resident of Chicago’s South Side with deep ties to the University of Chicago, Lindy Bergman enriched and helped transform the life of her native city and former school through six decades of dedication and generous financial commitment to the arts, education and medical care. Known for her indomitable spirit, she became a tireless champion of helping the blind after losing her eyesight in later years.

Betty Jane (“Lindy”) Bergman, AB’39, died peacefully in her home on Jan. 18. She was 96. A memorial service will be held at 11 a.m. Tuesday, Jan. 21 at Chicago Sinai Congregation at 15 W. Delaware Place.

Bergman’s contributions to the UChicago community included service on the boards of the University of Chicago Medical Center, the Lying-In Hospital, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Museum of Contemporary Art. Her late husband, Edwin A. Bergman, served on the University of Chicago’s Board of Trustees from 1976 to 1986 and was chair of the Board of Trustees from 1981 to 1985. Her son Robert was a member of the UChicago Medicine board until 2013, and her son-in-law Andrew Rosenfield, a University alumnus, is a University Trustee who joined the board in 1996. Her daughter Betsy is a member of the University’s Woman’s Board.

“Lindy Bergman was an extraordinary woman,” said University of Chicago President Robert J. Zimmer. “She and her husband had an abiding dedication to the issues of medical care and the arts, and Chicago and its residents have benefited through the commitments they made. She was a wonderful model for how to live a rich and deeply engaged life.”

Bergman’s connection to UChicago dated back to her earliest years. She graduated from the Laboratory Schools in 1935 and then the College in 1939. Over the years, Bergman, along with her husband, also a UChicago alumnus, supported the University in creative and generous ways. She established the Bergman Gallery, home to the Renaissance Society in Cobb Hall, placed artwork throughout the corridors of the University of Chicago Medical Center and was a devoted advocate for the Renaissance Society.

“Lindy cherished the arts and valued her relationships with the artists,” said Arthur Sussman, a lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, who served with Bergman on institutional committees. “She contributed to many of their accomplishments and valued her many relationships with students, staff and faculty. She was a true friend of the University.”

Bergman endowed the Lindy Bergman Distinguished Service Professorship, currently held by Prof. Mark Siegler, and the Edwin A. Bergman Scholarship in the College. During the University’s Campaign for the Next Century in the 1990s, she was committed to long-term funding for the Bergman Family Eye Center.

In addition, Bergman was a life member of the University of Chicago Medical Center Board of Trustees, a life member of the Humanities Visiting Committee, a life member of the board of governors of the Smart Museum of Art, a member of the Women's Board and a life member of the Music Visiting Committee.

Patron of the Arts

Bergman and her husband were passionate art collectors—she attributed her interest in modern art to a course she had taken at UChicago in the 1950s. A teacher at the class recommended her a book called Masters in Modern Art. “Every night we would start reading about art,” she told her friend Beth Finke, an author and journalist. “That’s how it (art collection) all began. We really educated ourselves.” Subsequently, Bergman and her husband became established as modern art collectors and assembled a legendary collection of mostly Surrealist art, including the definitive collection of works by Joseph Cornell.

In 1991, Bergman gave the bulk of her family collection, including seminal works by Magritte, Ernst, Picasso, Miro, Dali and Cornell, to the Art Institute of Chicago. With this donation, which was hailed as “one of the most important gifts of art in [the Art Institute’s] 112-year history,” Bergman transformed the stature of the museum as a repository of the Surrealist and near-Surrealist material. The collection is now a core part of the permanent collection and displayed cohesively in the Edwin A. and Lindy Bergman Gallery in the Museum’s Modern Wing.

Other important works from the Bergman’s collection were also donated and currently reside in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA, and The Israel Museum, among others.

After donating her collection, Bergman took to writing and in 2011, authored a book “Out of Sight, Not Out of Mind,” which documented her fight with vision loss due to macular degeneration. She provided guidance and advice for those with the same affliction

“While everyone knew that Lindy was smart, gracious, generous and charming, what they didn't always expect was that she had a sharp, irreverent, wicked sense of humor,” said David Epstein, who was a family friend of Bergman.

“Lindy Bergman was a woman of great warmth and generosity with an exceptional gift for friendship," said University of Chicago President Emerita Hanna H. Gray. “She demonstrated through her wide-ranging philanthropy, her constructive participation in so many different areas of university life, and her unwavering advocacy for its purposes an unmatched devotion to the University. Lindy brought good cheer to every gathering and a spirit of optimism and caring to every encounter. Her modesty and grace, and her determination to support the best in education, medicine and art, made her a special and greatly cherished member of our community.”

In addition to her son Robert and daughter Betsy, Bergman also is survived by daughter Carol Cohen, seven grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.

In lieu of flowers, donations may be made in her honor to the University of Chicago’s Odyssey Scholarship program.

Jean Bethke Elshtain, scholar of religion and political philosophy, 1941-2013

Mon, 12 Aug 2013 21:43 -0500

Update: A memorial service for Prof. Jean Bethke Elshtain will be held at 4:30 p.m. Oct. 17 in Rockefeller Memorial Chapel. The service, which will feature tributes from her colleagues at the Divinity School and elsewhere, will be followed by a reception in the third-floor lecture hall in Swift Hall.

The service coincides with the final "Engaged Mind" conference, a four-year series that explores the themes of Elshtain's scholarship. The conference takes place Oct. 17-18 at the Divinity School. For more information and a full schedule of events, please visit http://divinity.uchicago.edu/engaged-mind-just-war-against-terror.

Jean Bethke Elshtain, one of the nation’s most prominent and provocative thinkers on religion, political philosophy, and ethics, died Sunday following a major cardiac incident earlier this summer. She was 72.

Elshtain was the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics in the Divinity School, Political Science, and the Committee on International Relations at the University of Chicago.

An agile and extraordinarily prolific scholar, Elshtain’s work touched on issues ranging from terrorism to bioethics to feminism. She also lectured across the world on these topics in an effort to bring the work of the academy to a wider public.

“Jean Bethke Elshtain was a formidable intellectual presence in the academy and in American public life,” said Margaret M. Mitchell, the Shailer M. Mathews Professor of New Testament and Early Christian Literature and dean of the Divinity School. “Her arrival at the Divinity School in 1995 came on the heels of the publication of Democracy on Trial, which was and remains a major statement of the crucial dimension of morality in American public discourse. We in the Divinity School and the University will miss Jean greatly.”

Elshtain’s work was characterized by a combination of “hard-nosed realism and a very humane heart,” said her close friend and colleague William Schweiker, the Edward L. Ryerson Distinguished Service Professor of Theological Ethics in the Divinity School.

“She was suspicious of regimes of power, and she was always concerned with political and social systems that wanted to remake human life without respect for our finitude,” Schweiker said. “She was very attuned to the needs and goods of everyday life, and through her work she always fought on behalf of these mundane, quotidian interests.”

Schweiker said many of these themes came together in Elshtain’s work on sovereignty, which was the topic of her 2005-2006 Gifford Lectures, “Sovereign God, Sovereign State, Sovereign Self.”

Elshtain was the author of many other influential works, including Women and War, an exploration of the traditional status of women as noncombatants; Augustine and the Limits of Politics, which applies Augustinian thought to contemporary politics and society; and Just War Against Terror, which made a vigorous and widely discussed moral argument for greater American military engagement abroad.

She is also the author of Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought; Meditations on Modern Political Thought; Democracy on Trial; Real Politics: At the Center of Everyday Life; Who are We? Critical Reflections, Hopeful Possibilities; and Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy.

Although Elshtain’s colleagues did not always share her views, she remained a trusted interlocutor whose challenging questions always helped to strengthen their work, according to Prof. Martin Marty.

“She loved to provoke and, through provocations, to stimulate conversation, argument and opportunities to learn,” said Marty, the Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the Divinity School. “No doubt many commentators on her work will spend their energies discussing her from what are called ‘conservative’ or ‘liberal’ stances. But to reduce her to categories of partisanship or ideology, would be to miss the scholar.

“I recall the real Jean: friendly, buoyant, tireless, inquisitive, and faithful (and faith-full) in respect to family, the republic, and the vocation of teaching and learning.”

Elshtain was born in Windsor, Colo., on Jan. 6, 1941. As a teenager, she was stricken with polio, but never let her physical challenges stop her. “She was truly ‘abled’ as she made the rounds of conferences, lectureships and any setting, including a coffee shop, where original ideas were honored,” Marty said.

Despite her ambitious lecture schedule and commitment to her research, Elshtain never neglected her students or her teaching duties, according to Prof. Stephen Meredith, who co-taught several courses with Elshtain and remembered her “broad and imaginative” approach to her work.

“She was a brilliant teacher who seemed to know everything about everything,” said Meredith, Professor in Pathology, Biochemistry, Molecular Biology and the College, and associate faculty in the Divinity School. “She cannot be replaced.”

Elshtain was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Guggenheim Fellow and fellow at the Bellagio Center of the Rockefeller Foundation; holder of the Maguire Chair in Ethics at the Library of Congress; and a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., where she also served on the board of trustees. She was a Phi Beta Kappa Lecturer, and in 2002, she received the Goodnow Award, the highest award bestowed by the American Political Science Association for distinguished service to the profession. She served on the boards of the National Humanities Center and the National Endowment for Democracy, and was a member of the Council of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Scholars Council of the Library of Congress.

Elshtain is survived by her husband Errol; her four children, Sheri, Heidi, Jenny and Eric; and her grandchildren, JoAnn Paulette Welch, Robert Paul Bethke, Christopher Matthew Welch and Christiane Lind Elshtain.

Elshtain’s work was the subject of a four-part conference series at the Divinity School, “The Engaged Mind,” which began in 2010. The final conference will take place Oct. 17-18 and will provide an opportunity for the UChicago community to come together in celebration of Elshtain’s life and work.

Reva Logan, devoted supporter of the arts, 1922-2013

Thu, 25 Jul 2013 16:15 -0500

Reva Logan, who along with her husband David was a founding donor of the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, died July 22 at home after a long struggle with Alzheimer’s disease. She was 91.

The couple supported the arts in numerous ways for decades, and the family considered the Logan Center their greatest project. Reva and David, AB’39, JD’41, met on the steps of the University of Chicago Law School, when they were both studying at the University. Over the course of more than 60 years of marriage, they built a partnership that sustained their family as well as a wide community of artists, writers and scholars.

Reva Logan “was the rock of our household,” said her son Jonathan. “She had to be. With four men to organize, feed and get out the door each day, it was no picnic, yet she did it with a smile and an occasional kick in the pants. She was always there for us.”

The values that Reva Logan instilled in her children carried over to her passion for the arts, said her son Dan. “My Mom and Dad have always believed that the arts tell us who we are,” he said at the Logan Center’s groundbreaking in May 2010. “They inspire us, and they make us better people.”

That faith in the inspiring power of the arts has been a driving force in the success of the Logan Center, which opened in 2012 to widespread praise. Chicago Tribune arts critic Howard Reich wrote in January 2013: “By any measure, the arrival of the Logan (Center) stands as a major event—not just for the university and for Hyde Park, but for all Chicago and beyond.”

“With her passion for the arts, youth and community, Reva Logan provided inspiration for all involved with the Logan Center for the Arts. We will continue to celebrate her legacy by inspiring the next generation of artists, both at the University, across the South Side and throughout Chicago,” said Bill Michel, executive director of the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts.

Her family described Reva Logan as an important presence behind the scenes for the family and their community. She grew up in Hyde Park, and attended Hyde Park High School and the University of Chicago. She taught for years at the Winnetka Community Nursery School.

Together, the Logans helped enhance and transform the practice of the arts across the nation. In the 1960s, Reva Logan, along with David, began collecting artist-illustrated books. The collection eventually became one of the preeminent collections in the United States, and it now resides at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. They are the initial sponsors of The Jazz Loft Project of the Center for Documentary Studies, featuring photographs and music taped by W. Eugene Smith, which has been exhibited at Lincoln Center and the Chicago Cultural Center. They also have been major supporters of Ken Burns’ series Jazz on PBS and the multicultural literary organization, The Guild Complex.

Journalism was another field where the Logans offered pivotal support. They helped establish the nonprofit Center for Investigative Reporting as a leader in its field. Their foundation has also provided significant support for the PBS program Frontline and sponsors the annual Logan Symposium, the leading international conference for investigative reporters and students at University of California, Berkeley.

“For all her accomplishments alongside her husband, Reva’s greatest joy was her family, especially her grandchildren,” said her son Richard. “She was never happier or more fulfilled than when in their company—helping them to learn new skills and the lessons of life, and just plain having fun."

David S. Logan preceded his wife in death in 2011. Reva Logan is survived by three sons—Dan, of Alexandria, Va.; Richard, of Oxford, England; and Jonathan, of Berkeley, Calif.—as well as grandchildren Daniel, Erin, Crystal, Reuben, Angelica, Elizabeth, Andrew, Lily and Edward, and great-grandchildren Tiego and Malachi.

Services will be held at 2 p.m. Tuesday, July 30 at Weinstein Funeral Home in Wilmette, Ill. In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to the Alzheimer’s Association.

Richard G. Stern, Prof. Emeritus of English and prolific author, 1928-2013

Tue, 29 Jan 2013 12:57 -0600

UPDATE: A campus memorial service will be held at Bond Chapel on Nov. 8 at 3:30 p.m.

He published more than 20 books in his lifetime, but Richard Stern insisted he was never a driven writer.

“I’ve never needed to write,” he explained in 2010. “I wrote because I wanted to.”

Stern, the Helen A. Regenstein Professor Emeritus in English Language & Literature and the College, died Jan. 24 at age 84.

In his distinguished and prolific career as a writer, teacher and scholar, Stern crossed paths with many of the leading literary figures of his generation, including his friends Saul Bellow, X’39, and Philip Roth, AM’55.

Known as a writer’s writer, Stern was widely respected by his contemporaries. His fans not only included Bellow and Roth, but also Norman Mailer, Bernard Malamud and Flannery O’Connor.

“Every writer in America read and admired him,” Roth told the New York Times.

Stern was born Feb. 25, 1928, in New York, NY. He received his BA from the University of North Carolina in 1947, his AM from Harvard University in 1949, and his PhD from the University of Iowa in 1954.

He joined the University of Chicago faculty in 1955, where he quickly earned a reputation as a demanding but devoted teacher of American literature and creative writing.

“He was well-liked, admired and loved by the talented people he worked with,” said his longtime colleague David Bevington, the Phyllis Fay Horton Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in English Language and Literature.

Stern found an intellectual home at the University. “The great thing about the University is the remarkable people here in all fields,” he wrote in 2002. “I’ve spent a lot of time listening to them, having all sorts of things explained.”

At Chicago, he developed close friendships with Norman Maclean, PhD’40, and Roth, who credits Stern with giving him the idea for Roth’s novella, Goodbye, Columbus. Stern “got a kick out of the stories” of Roth’s New Jersey upbringing, Roth told the Chicago Tribune in 1983. “‘Why don’t you write that down?’ he said.”

Stern was instrumental in bringing numerous distinguished writers to campus to discuss their work and offer guidance to his students.

In his 2010 collection Still On Call, Stern recalled visits from Kingsley Amis, Ralph Ellison, Robert Lowell and Flannery O’Connor “whose blue eyes glared at me with bitterness, when I picked her up at 3 a.m. at the Greyhound Station after her plane had been iced down in Louisville.”

Over his 46-year career at the University, Stern forged a strong attachment to Hyde Park. “I know every house and if not every person, tree and dog, I know where they belong and what they probably do,” he said in an interview with the University of Chicago Chronicle in 2006. “Why live anywhere else?”

Both university life and the city of Chicago provided inspiration for Stern’s fiction. Many of his short stories and novels prominently featured professors and intellectuals; his best-known novel, Other Men’s Daughters (1973) describes the affair between a middle-aged professor and his young student. His 2005 short story collection Almonds to Zhoof was rich with references to the city where he spent most of his adult life.

Stern’s career was launched with his first novel, Golk (1960), a satirical portrait of a TV show similar to “Candid Camera.” That work drew comparisons to Nabokov and Bellow and praise from Joan Didion and Norman Mailer.

His other novels include Stitch (1965), Natural Shocks (1978), and A Father’s Words (1986). He also wrote the short story collections Packages (1980), Noble Rot (1988), and The Books in Fred Hampton’s Apartment (1973).

Stern received the Award of Merit from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1985. His other honors included a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Heartland Prize.

Stern was an avid tennis player and observer of the sport, and he loved to travel, keeping journals on his tours from the beaches of California and Rhode Island to distant outposts across his beloved Europe, Asia and elsewhere.

“I wanted to get around the world, to be at home everywhere,” he wrote.

Stern is survived by his wife Alane Rollings, BA’72, MA’75; four children from his first marriage, Christopher, Andrew, Nicholas and Kate; and five grandchildren.

Charles Rosen, music scholar and acclaimed pianist, 1927-2012

Mon, 17 Dec 2012 11:54 -0600

Charles Rosen, an internationally acclaimed pianist and a distinguished scholar and author in music history and analysis, died Dec. 9 in New York. Rosen, professor emeritus in the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought and Music, was 85.

He was the author of numerous books in musicology, including The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, which won the National Book Award in 1972. The book is now translated into six languages and is considered essential reading for music students at universities and colleges throughout the United States.

He joined the UChicago faculty in 1985 and taught one quarter each academic year. He retired in April 1996, at which time he gave a farewell concert.

Anne Walters Robertson, the Claire Dux Swift Distinguished Service Professor in Music History and former chair of Music, called him “one of the greatest living concert pianists.”

“His playing has links to the late-19th-century Romantic tradition that one does not always find in younger pianists,” she added.

Throughout his academic career, Rosen was known for his scholarship in music. The New York Times called his 1995 book, The Romantic Generation, “That rarity: a work of detailed musical analysis that combines profound scholarship with artistic intuition.” The book, which stemmed from a series of lectures Rosen gave at Harvard University, traces the history of music from Beethoven’s death in 1827 to Chopin’s death in 1849. He also wrote The Sonata Forms (1970), which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

”What we appreciate most about Charles,” said Robertson at the time of his retirement, “is that his whole approach to music is that of an extremely accomplished performer. His strong scholarly skills and insights well up out of his musicianship.”

Rosen began studying music at the age of 4, and he was enrolled in the Juilliard School of Music at 6. At 11, he began studying with Moritz Rosenthal, who was a pupil of Franz Liszt.

Rosen received his PhD in French literature from Princeton University in 1951, the same year he made his critically acclaimed New York debut. As a result of that success, he chose a career in music.

In addition to performing extensive concert tours throughout the world, he recorded for such labels as Sony and Nonesuch. Some of the most distinguished 20th-century composers called upon Rosen to record their works: Igor Stravinsky invited him to record “Movement for Piano and Orchestra,” and Elliott Carter invited him to record “Double Concerto.”

Among his most highly acclaimed recordings are the three-record sets “The Last Keyboard Works of Johann Sebastian Bach” and “The Last Six Beethoven Sonatas.” He received a Grammy Award nomination for his recording of Beethoven’s “Diabelli Variations.”

He was a member of the American Philosophical Society. Among the awards and honors he has received is the George Peabody Medal for Outstanding Contributions to American Music from the Johns Hopkins University.

Philosopher Leonard Linsky, 1922-2012

Fri, 05 Oct 2012 10:35 -0500

Leonard Linsky’s contributions to philosophy went beyond his pioneering work in the philosophy of language. For colleagues and generations of students, Linsky was a passionate interlocutor whose joy in discussing his field was both obvious and infectious.

“He would talk about philosophy with anybody, all the time,” his son Bernard Linsky said.

Linsky died Aug. 27 at the age of 89.

His landmark books—Referring (1967), Names and Descriptions (1977), and Oblique Contexts (1983)—were influential explorations of how names and descriptive expressions can be used to talk about real-world objects and phenomena, a central issue in the philosophy of language.

He edited the 1952 collection Semantics and the Philosophy of Language, an anthology that brought together seminal texts in the philosophy of language and helped “establish the canon in the field at mid-20th century,” said Michael Kremer, the Mary R. Morton Professor of Philosophy.

Later in his career, Linsky delved more deeply into the history of modern logic and early analytic philosophy, with a particular focus on the work of Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Linsky was notable for his ability to clearly articulate the central issues at the heart of his field, according to his colleagues. “People would take his presentation of problems as a starting point for finding the solutions,” said Bernard Linsky, a professor of philosophy at the University of Alberta.

While he would ultimately advance his own opinions, said William Tait, Professor Emeritus in Philosophy, “I always felt that the main thing for him was to clearly understand the issues. Talking with him was very therapeutic in this respect,” Tait edited Early Analytic Philosophy: Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein: Essays in Honor of Leonard Linsky, a collection that grew out of a 1992 conference on the occasion of Linsky's retirement.

Linsky received his BA, MA, and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. He taught at the University of Illinois prior to teaching at Chicago.

After a sabbatical in Europe in the 1970s, Linsky developed a keen interest in Italian art, architecture, and culture, and looked forward to summer trips to Florence and Tuscany. He also enjoyed classical music and concerts by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Yet his friends and colleagues say that Linsky’s true passion was philosophy, and his interest in the subject was endless, according to his longtime friend Tait.

“Generations of his colleagues and students had the pleasure of chance encounters—in coffee shops, on the streets, wherever—that turned into lively discussions of his latest philosophical preoccupations,” Tait said.

Linsky enjoyed attending get-togethers with graduate students in the department, though he tended to skip the small talk. He spent hours in the Nonesuch Coffee Shop on the fourth floor of Wieboldt Hall, sitting on the floor when there was no space at the tables, talking nonstop with students about their research.

So beloved was Linsky among his colleagues and students that the philosophy department’s intramural basketball team proudly bore the name “Leonard Linsky’s All-Stars,” according to team member Eric Schliesser, PhD’02.

Schliesser got to know Linsky over long conversations in the Classics Café and the Bonjour Bakery, and found him to be a source of “endless, fascinating anecdotes about the department and the giants of analytical philosophy from earlier generations.

“Philosophy was the oxygen of his life, even though it was not his whole life,” Schliesser said.

Kremer remembered Linsky as “a gracious and generous colleague, even in retirement. He was a lovely man and a great philosopher, and I will miss him.”

Leonard Linsky is survived by his sons Bernard and Harry; granddaughters Andrea, Ruth and Jean; niece Jessica Spanos; and his companion Alexandra Bellow. He was preceded in death by his wife Joan Linsky (née Gregg) in 2001. Donations in Linsky’s honor may be made to the Department of Philosophy, 1115 E. 58th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Divinity School student Joshua Casteel, 1979-2012

Tue, 18 Sep 2012 09:56 -0500

Update: A memorial service for Joshua Casteel will be held at 5 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 9 on the third floor of Swift Hall.

Joshua Casteel, a graduate student at the University of Chicago’s Divinity School, died Aug. 25 in New York City after battling lung cancer. He was 32.

In addition to his academic work at the Divinity School, Casteel was an active member of Iraq Veterans Against the War. He lectured widely about his time as an interrogator at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison and his decision to become a conscientious objector.

"There is simply no one like Joshua Casteel and the Divinity School community is keenly grieved at his loss,” said Margaret M. Mitchell, the Shailer Mathews Professor of New Testament and Early Christian Literature, and dean of the Divinity School. “This remarkable man, with such a remarkable history, who was our student, colleague, passionate interlocutor and friend, has left his mark here and will be continually remembered with fondness and admiration."

A native of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Casteel joined the Army Reserves at age 17 and attended the University of Iowa on an ROTC Scholarship. He served with the Army’s 202nd Military Intelligence Battalion as an Arabic translator and interrogator.

At Abu Ghraib, Casteel’s pacifist views solidified, a transformation he described in the documentary “Soldiers of Conscience.”

During an interrogation, a 22-year-old self-proclaimed jihadist suggested that Casteel was not following his own Christian faith. “[He said] I wasn’t fulfilling the call to turn the other cheek, to love one’s enemies,” Casteel said. “When posed with that kind of challenge, I had nothing I could say to him. I absolutely agreed with him. My position as a U.S. Army interrogator contradicted my calling simply as a Christian.”

Casteel applied for conscientious objector status and was honorably discharged from the Army in May 2005.

After returning to civilian life, Casteel studied at the Iowa Playwright’s Workshop, where he received his MFA. He is the author of two plays about his experiences in Iraq, Returns and The Interrogation Room, as well as Letters from Abu Ghraib (Essay Press, 2008), a collection of e-mails he wrote while serving in Iraq.

He enrolled at the Divinity School in 2010, where his scholarly interests included theology, philosophy, and religion and literature. Although his illness prevented Casteel from completing his MA, he “achieved distinctive clarity in a very short span,” according to his advisor, Richard Rosengarten, Associate Professor in the Divinity School.

“Few have written with such a combination of dignity, strength, and vulnerability about the experience of waging war in Iraq. We're diminished in our loss, but ennobled and very grateful in memory of him,” Rosengarten added.

Casteel greeted his diagnosis with strength and grace, according to his roommate Aaron Hollander, a PhD student in the Divinity School. “He didn’t sit around asking why. He didn’t treat it as an unfair reality,” Hollander said. “He decided he would rise above the illness and treat it as a chance to connect with people.”

Despite his difficult treatment, Casteel even continued to teach a graduate writing workshop at Columbia College during his illness.

His friends from UChicago remember Casteel for his passionate intellectualism both in and out of the classroom. He could often be found sitting outside Swift Hall with a stack of books, ready to engage in “rich, deep” conversations with whoever came by, according to his friend Michael Le Chevallier, a PhD student in the Divinity School.

“Josh came most to life when he was vigorously debating ideas,” Le Chevallier said.

Yet his friends also recall Casteel’s lighthearted side and winking sense of humor. Casteel, who rooted for Notre Dame, was equally comfortable discussing college football and 19th-century Russian philosophy, often simultaneously. A man of many talents, he made “the best guacamole I’d ever had, and was always willing to share,” Hollander remembered.

During his time at UChicago, Casteel developed a keen interest in personalism, a theological worldview that places particular significance on subjectivity and relationships.

“Josh didn’t merely understand personalism, he lived his philosophy,” Hollander said. “You can see that in the overflowing of love towards him from all over the country and all over the world. He was a force in people’s lives, and they came out of the woodwork to support him.”

Casteel is survived by his mother, Kristi, and his sisters Naomi and Rebekah.

Michel-Rolph Trouillot, scholar of Caribbean history, 1949-2012

Tue, 10 Jul 2012 13:36 -0500

Michel-Rolph Trouillot, a professor of anthropology at UChicago and a leading authority on the dynamics of power across cultural boundaries, died July 5. He was 62.

“Rolph touched many people, both personally and professionally. He had a deeply challenging, critical and caring mind and leaves behind an impressive scholarly legacy that extends beyond his published work,” said Greg Beckett, PhD’08,  Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Social Sciences Division, of his former professor.

“As a teacher and colleague he offered a model of compassionate, concerned and joyful intellectual inquiry. Rolph asked difficult questions, and he insisted others do the same. He opened new frontiers in the study of the Caribbean, but his impact extends far beyond the region. His work has significantly transformed our understanding of the role of power in the modern world. I am grateful to have known him and worked with him.”

Trouillot joined the UChicago faculty in 1998 after serving as the Krieger/Eisenhower Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and director of the Institute for Global Studies in Culture, Power and History at Johns Hopkins University.

Trouillot grew up in Haiti and came to the United States to join the Haitian exile community in New York during the years of Duvalier dictatorships in the late 1960s. Before beginning scholarly study, he was a songwriter and activist involved in political protest against the Duvalier dictatorship in Haiti and against the American government’s treatment of undocumented Haitian immigrants.

He wrote an important book in Haitian Creole published in 1977, the year before he graduated from college: Ti Dife Boule sou Istoua Ayiti. The book was a history of the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804.

He received a BA in Caribbean history and culture from the City University of New York in 1978 and a PhD in anthropology from Johns Hopkins in 1985.

He also studied the historical evolution of Caribbean peasantries, their inconsistent integration in the world economy and their role in the building of nationhood.

He was the author and co-author of a number of other books, including Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World (2003), Open the Social Sciences (1996), Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995), Haiti: State against Nation: The Origins and Legacy of Duvalierism (1990) and Peasants and Capital; Dominica in the World Economy (1988).

The Caribbean Philosophical Association awarded him the 2011 Frantz Fanon Lifetime Achievement Award “for the originality of his interrogations in the human sciences, especially anthropology and history, and his articulation of the importance and challenges of Haiti in contemporary discussions of freedom and reclamations of the past.”

Jean Comaroff, formerly a professor of anthropology at UChicago and now at Harvard University, said at the time: “There could be few more appropriate recipients of the Fanon prize than Michel-Rolph Trouillot. His life and work embody the brilliant, restless spirit of Fanon, carrying forward the long, searing conversation between Caribbean critique and the legacy of Western humanism.” Fanon, who grew up in Martinique, was a writer who influenced postcolonial studies.

Yarimar Bonilla, PhD’08, a former student of Trouillot and an assistant professor of anthropology at Rutgers University, said, “It's hard to know how to mark the passing of someone who has so thoroughly transformed your life through both word and deed.

“Rolph's work is the gold-standard for me intellectually, but he was also a deep personal inspiration: bold, charismatic, unabashed, unapologetic, and fully engaged with life's pleasures and ironies. He offered a model of an academic who never compromised on life, love or laughter. I don't think this was coincidental to the power of his work. His writing does not just inform — it inspires and transforms. He always encouraged his students to find their ‘burning questions’ to follow their passions as this was what would truly sustain them and feed not just their careers but their souls.”

A service will be held in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. A public memorial at UChicago is being planned for the fall.