I write with more sad news: our colleague, Barbara Fass Leavy, who retired in 1996, died on Sunday. David Richter, who informed me of Barbara’s death, was able to attend her funeral earlier this week.

Barbara graduated from Queens College, summa cum laude, in 1964, with a BA in English, went on to earn her M.A. and Ph.D. from NYU, and returned to Queens as Assistant Professor in 1969. Barbara published widely, including the following books: La Belle Dame sans Merci & the Aesthetics of Romanticism, Ibsen’s Forsaken Mermen: Folklore in the Late Plays (with Per Schelde Jacobsen, To Blight with Plague: Studies in a Literary Theme, In Search of the Swan Maiden: A Narrative on Folklore and Gender, and The Fiction of Ruth Rendell: Ancient Tragedy and the Modern Family.

Most of you won’t have known Barbara, but she was a sharp, dedicated teacher and colleague. When she retired in the midst of budget uncertainty (with a [never-instituted] plan on the table to dissolve the English Department and “retrench” nine faculty members), she wrote to the Department: “My retirement does not relieve my sense of great dismay concerning what is being done to a fine department…. While my personal stake in the Department’s future shifts as the result of my decision to retire, my emotions remain attached to this present crisis and my outrage about pernicious forces at work behind our backs persists. I wish all of the Department, individually and collectively, my best.”

I like to think that Barbara would approve of the way the English Department weathered that particular crisis and moved forward in the two subsequent decades.

All my best,
Steve Kruger