We have just lost a good one. Emory Elliott, a University Professor at UC Riverside and one of the leading figures in American literature, died of a heart attack last Tuesday at the all too young age of 66. Emory was probably the leading figure in the humanities at UCR, and the force behind its innovative Center for Ideas and Society – one of the most interesting of the campus-based humanities institutes founded during the last couple of decades.

Emory was trained as a specialist in early American literature, so our scholarly interests were close, and he was a good friend and deeply valued colleague of mine during the years he taught at Princeton. We became particularly close in the early 1980s when we were both initial masters of the new residential colleges. Emory was deeply committed to undergraduate education, and also to the integration of social with intellectual life. He had the very good instinct to hire Ruth Simmons as the dean of his college, thereby bringing one of the nation’s most important educators to Princeton at a formative stage of her career. And he was part of my small team of “usual suspects” among the faculty, those who were willing to devote themselves to the improvement of undergraduate education and life. But, unlike some of us, Emory never stopped producing a steady stream of important scholarship, the best known of which is probably his Columbia Literary History of the United States.

In 1989 Emory left a dominant role at Princeton in order to be one of the leaders of the relatively new Riverside campus of the University of California, where he continued both his scholarly productivity and his institution-building capacities. The CIS at UCR is doubtless his monument. He also continued the international work he had begun early in his career, teaching and lecturing in many countries around the world. He was one of the pioneers of the internationalization of American Studies, and it was always a pleasure to see him nurturing younger scholars in the field in other countries.

Emory was a great collaborator, and his greatest collaboration was with his wife, Georgia, currently the associate vice chancellor for development at UCR. Georgia has always been part of Emory’s public life, and all of us who have benefited from working with him have come to admire her. She has lost a great partner, and the university world has lost not only a talented, gentle soul, but one of its best citizens. We are truly sorry to lose Emory, Georgia.