Barbara Josephine Lewalski (; February 22, 1931 – March 2, 2018)
[Roberts, Sam (March 29, 2018).]
. ''The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...
''. nytimes.com. Retrieved 2018-03-30.[Barbara Lewalski profile](_blank)
legacy.com. Retrieved 2018-03-10. was an American academic, an authority on
Renaissance literature particularly known for her work on
John Milton.
Early life
Born in
Topeka, Kansas
Topeka ( ; Kansa: ; iow, Dópikˀe, script=Latn or ) is the capital city of the U.S. state of Kansas and the seat of Shawnee County. It is along the Kansas River in the central part of Shawnee County, in northeast Kansas, in the Central U ...
, to John Kiefer, a farmer, and Vivo (), an elementary schoolteacher and speech therapist, she received her BSE at
Emporia State University
Emporia State University (Emporia State or ESU) is a public university in Emporia, Kansas, United States. Established in March 1863 as the Kansas State Normal School, Emporia State is the third-oldest public university in the state of Kansas. E ...
in 1950 and her AM in 1951. She went on to earn a PhD at the
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private university, private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park, Chicago, Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chic ...
in 1956.
Career
Her first book, ''Milton’s Brief Epic: The Genre, Meaning and Art of Paradise Regained'', has been praised as a "trail-blazing" work that marshals "great learning in the service of understanding a specific artefact, without swamping the artefact."
Lewalski was a
Guggenheim Fellow
Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the a ...
in 1967, and was elected a fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, a ...
in 1980 and a member of the
American Philosophical Society
The American Philosophical Society (APS), founded in 1743 in Philadelphia, is a scholarly organization that promotes knowledge in the sciences and humanities through research, professional meetings, publications, library resources, and communit ...
in 1986.
From 1983 to 2010 she was the
William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of English Literature and of History and Literature at
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of high ...
. From 1956 to 1982 she taught at
Brown University, holding the positions of Alumni-Alumnae University Professor (1976–82), Director of Graduate Studies in English (1968–72), and Chair of the Renaissance Studies Program (1976–80).
In 2016, the Renaissance Society of America awarded her the Paul Oskar Kristeller Lifetime Achievement Award for recognition of her decades of scholarship.
Lewalski died in
Providence, Rhode Island
Providence is the capital and most populous city of the U.S. state of Rhode Island. One of the oldest cities in New England, it was founded in 1636 by Roger Williams, a Reformed Baptist theologian and religious exile from the Massachusetts ...
, at the age of 87. She had congestive heart failure and died of a heart attack on March 2, 2018.
Works
*''Milton's Brief Epic'' (1966)
*''Donne's "Anniversaries" and the Poetry of Praise: The Creation of a Symbolic Mode'' (1973)
*''Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century English Lyric'' (1979)
*''Paradise Lost and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms'' (1985)
*''Writing Women in Jacobean England'' (1993)
*(editor) ''The Polemics and Poems of Rachel Speght'' (1996)
*''The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography'' (2000)
*(editor) John Milton, ''Paradise Lost'' (2007)
References
Further reading
*
Amy Boesky
Amy Boesky is an American author and a professor of English at Boston College.
Life
Born in Detroit, Boesky studied her undergraduate degree at Harvard College before completing a M.Phil in Renaissance English at the University of Oxford. After ...
, Mary Thomas Crane (editors) (2000)
''Form and Reform in Renaissance England: Essays in Honor of Barbara Kiefer Lewalski''!-- publisher, ISSN/ISBN needed -->
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1931 births
2018 deaths
American academics of English literature
American literary historians
Harvard University faculty
Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Members of the American Philosophical Society
People from Topeka, Kansas
Brown University faculty
Emporia State University alumni
University of Chicago alumni