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

Biography

She received a B.A. 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] 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. 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. ^ a b c d e 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.
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