Rosalie Littell Colie

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Rosalie Littell Colie (1924-1972) was a professor of comparative literature, a specialist in Renaissance English literature, and a poet.

Contents

Education

She received an A.B. from Vassar College in 1944, a M.A. from Columbia University in 1946, and a Ph.D. in English and History from Columbia in 1950. [1]

Career

In 1948-49, she was an instructor at Douglass College, and was appointed as Assistant and Associate Professor at Barnard College and Columbia, 1949-1961. [2] She taught and researched at Wesleyan College 1961-1963, at the University of Iowa from 1963 to 1966, was visiting professor at Yale in 1966-67, and was visiting research professor at Oxford University, 1967-68, [3] Lady Margaret Hall College. [4] In January 1972 she received the first appointment of a woman to the chairmanship of an academic department at Brown University, in the Department of Comparative Literature. [5] She was the first to hold the Nancy Duke Lewis Professorship, the first professorship at Brown endowed for women, which had been established in 1967. [6] She received the Guggenheim Fellowship in Renaissance Studies twice, in 1958 and 1966. [7]

Hannah Arendt was a visiting fellow at Wesleyan College from 1961 when Colie was teaching at Wesleyan. [8] Their correspondence began in 1962, and Colie became a long-term correspondent of Arendt. In 1963, Colie had intended to fly to Europe to meet Arendt for a holiday, but these plans were thwarted by Colie's appointment to a position at the University of Iowa. On 19 March 1963, she wrote to Arendt: "I am going to go to Iowa: it is a good job. Full professorship, in both English literature and history, which is ideal. […] I feel a thousand years younger all of sudden, as if the albatross had gone off my neck and I could start to be a human being again instead of such a fake. […] The Iowa thing may ruin our summer plans. [S]han't get paid until September and have no dough." [8] On Arendt's return from Europe, they spent a week together before Colie moved to Iowa, and they met again in Chicago in May, 1964. [8]

Arendt wrote her a supportive reference in 1967 for her visiting position at Oxford University as Talbot Research Fellow, in which she described Colie as "one of the most erudite women I have ever known." [8] Arendt also wrote a letter of recommendation for her later position at Brown. [8] Letters between Colie and Arendt are held in the Hannah Arendt Papers at the Library of Congress Manuscript Division, Washington DC. [9] They have been studied by the feminist scholar, Kathleen B. Jones.

Colie published works on Renaissance paradox, genre theory and Shakespeare. She drowned on 7 July 1972 when her canoe overturned on the Lieutenant River near her home in Old Lyme, Connecticut. [10] Her friend George Robinson, an editor at Princeton University Press, published a posthumous selection of her poems.

Works

References

  1. "Encyclopedia Brunoniana | Colie, Rosalie L." www.brown.edu. Retrieved 2020-08-06.
  2. Scanlon, Jennifer; Cosner, Shaaron (1996). American Women Historians, 1700s-1990s: A Biographical Dictionary. Bloomsbury Academic. ISBN   9780313296642.
  3. "Encyclopedia Brunoniana | Colie, Rosalie L." www.brown.edu. Retrieved 2020-08-06.
  4. "Recent Deaths" . The American Historical Review. 78 (3): 757–766. 1973. doi:10.1086/559206. ISSN   0002-8762. JSTOR   1847783.
  5. "Encyclopedia Brunoniana | Colie, Rosalie L." www.brown.edu. Retrieved 2020-08-06.
  6. "Encyclopedia Brunoniana | Colie, Rosalie L." www.brown.edu. Retrieved 2020-08-06.
  7. "John Simon Guggenheim Foundation | Rosalie L. Colie" . Retrieved 2020-08-06.
  8. 1 2 3 4 5 Jones, Kathleen B. (12 November 2013). "Hannah Arendt's Female Friends". Los Angeles Review of Books. Retrieved 2020-08-13.
  9. Arendt, Hannah (1898–1977). "Hannah Arendt papers, 1898-1977". hdl.loc.gov. Retrieved 2020-08-13.
  10. "Recent Deaths" . The American Historical Review. 78 (3): 757–766. 1973. doi:10.1086/559206. ISSN   0002-8762. JSTOR   1847783.
  11. This volume is available in the Internet Archive.