In Memoriam: Professor Marshall Grossman

UPDATED: ARHU mourns the passing of English department professor, Marshall Grossman.Original Post: March 30, 2011, Department of English website.

UPDATED: ARHU mourns the passing of English department professor, Marshall Grossman.
Original Post: March 30, 2011, Department of English.
Photo from a 1996 newsletter, from University Archives. 

On March 29, 2011, the University of Maryland’s English department was deeply saddened with the news of the death of Professor Marshall Grossman, who died after a four-month battle with cancer. He was 63 years old.

Professor Grossman had been a member of the departmental faculty since 1989. He was a renowned and award-winning scholar on Milton, and had published and taught widely on the major figures and major issues of Renaissance literature. He was known to his colleagues as vigorous, brilliant, and intensely committed to intellectual and scholarly life.He was greatly admired by students, and especially beloved by the many graduate students who completed doctoral dissertations under his superb guidance.

David Lee Miller, Distinguished Professor of English at the University of South Carolina, and a close, long-time friend and colleague of Professor Grossman, wrote this:
 "If you knew him only by his work, then you knew a lot.  He was a brilliant critic. But those of us who knew him personally saw how the wit and brilliant mind were always in play.  Marshall could talk to you about anything–-politics, history, jazz, the more abstruse reaches of theory. He could make you laugh hard and think harder.  His table talk at the Folger Library lives in legend. To know him well enough was to see an underlying sweetness to his disposition that expressed itself mostly by indirection. Beneath his sometimes sardonic persona, he was an incredibly kind man."
 Professor Grossman received his doctorate in 1977 from New York University.  After teaching at Fordham University, he was appointed to the faculty at the University of Maryland as an associate professor.  He earned promotion to full professor in 1996.

Professor Grossman authored such publications as Authors to Themselves: Milton and the Revelation of History (Cambridge University Press, 1987); The Story of All Things: Writing the Self in English Renaissance Narrative Poetry (Duke University Press, 1998); The Seventeenth-Century Literature Handbook (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011); edited essay collections including Aemilia Lanyer: Gender, Genre, and the Canon (University Press of Kentucky, 1998) and Reading Renaissance Ethics (Routledge, 2007); and contributed over thirty articles to essay collections and journals, along with numerous reviews.

Professor Grossman was honored with various prizes and awards, including the National Endowment for the Humanities Long-term Fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library in 2009-10; the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for College Teachers and Independent Scholars, 1988-1989; the Fordham University Faculty Fellowship, 1988-1989; the Graduate Research Board Semester Award, 1994; the James Holly Hanford Award (Milton Society of America Book of the Year Award) for Authors to Themselves, 1987; and Outstanding Teacher Award, Celebrating Teachers Program, 1993.

He was an elected member of The Milton Seminar, 1989-present, and an executive board member of the Milton Society, 1989-92.  He had also served on the boards of many journals and scholarly organizations including the Folger Institute and PMLA, the journal of the Modern Language Association of America.

A famously witty and lively writer, Professor Grossman wrote political blogs for the Huffington Post. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marshall-grossman

He was interviewed in spring 2008 about his pedagogy; you may view an excerpt from one of his lectures and a discussion of his teaching philosophy in a video by Ben Prinkki here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2leSXN34C8 

Faculty, staff, and students in the English department feel a profound sense of loss, one shared by scholars and colleagues across the nation and around the world.
 

English Professor Orrin Wang writes in Memoriam Marshall Grossman.

UPDATE: 
The Department of English at the University of Maryland will hold a memorial service for our esteemed colleague, Professor Marshall Grossman, on Tuesday, April 26, from 4-5 p.m. at the gallery of the David Driskell Center in the Cole Student Activities Building on the University campus.  This service is open not only to all members of the University community but to all other colleagues, friends, former students, and associates of Professor Grossman.

Because Marshall did not wish to have a religious observance, the service will consist of recollections, reflections, and comments from attendees about Marshall and the profound contribution that he made to our work and to our lives.  Of course, anecdotes about Marshall's legendary sense of humor would also be welcome.  Attendees will have the opportunity to speak spontaneously about Marshall, but, if you know that you would like to make comments, I would ask that you please let us know in advance, so that we can compile an organized list of speakers for the initial part of the program; you may respond to Isabella Moulton.