Barbara Kiefer Lewalski | |
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| Born | (1931-02-22)February 22, 1931 |
| Died | March 2, 2018(2018-03-02) (aged 87) |
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Barbara Josephine Lewalski (née Kiefer; February 22, 1931 – March 2, 2018)[1][2] was an American academic, an authority onRenaissance literature particularly known for her work onJohn Milton.[3]
Born inTopeka, Kansas, to John Kiefer, a farmer, and Vivo (née Hutton), an elementary schoolteacher and speech therapist, she received her BSE atEmporia State University in 1950 and her AM in 1951. She went on to earn a PhD at theUniversity of Chicago in 1956.[4][5]
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."[6]
Lewalski was aGuggenheim Fellow in 1967,[7] and was elected a fellow of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1980 and a member of theAmerican Philosophical Society in 1986.[2]
From 1983 to 2010 she was theWilliam R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of English Literature and of History and Literature atHarvard University. From 1956 to 1982 she taught atBrown 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.[6]
Lewalski died inProvidence, Rhode Island, at the age of 87. She had congestive heart failure and died of a heart attack on March 2, 2018.[8]
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