Highlander Newspaper

Issue date: 4/3/09 Section: News

Media Credit: newsroom.ucr.edu University Professor of English Emory Elliott died Tuesday. In addition to teaching, he directed the Center for Ideas and Society.

In the middle of February, I had a conversation with Emory Elliott, the University Professor of English who suffered a fatal heart attack Tuesday night in his home, about James Baldwin. He regretted that the brevity of the quarter and the wide range of the class (Introduction to the American Literary Tradition) did not allow him the ability to include Baldwin's work in the course, work he considered essential. "But if you've got a few minutes," he said, "I'd love to tell you about him."
It was with that same attitude, that fierce love of learning, that Emory Elliott approached his students and colleagues, his family and friends, and ultimately was able to foster that same interest in those around him. Elliott was a man of intelligence (he earned his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois and taught at, among others, Princeton University before beginning his professorship at UCR in 1989), but more importantly, he was a man of character. He served, until his death, as the director of UCR's Center for Ideas and Society, actively recruiting guest speakers from around the world to give talks on campus and help advance the "understanding of human experience and cultural production."
Author, editor, and valued professor published on an expansive and diverse number of topics, Elliott made himself an institution over his two-decade long career at UCR.
He was also a mentor, helping graduate students focus their research and find jobs, introducing undergrads to the richness of literature and helping junior professors secure publication.
As a student of history and literature, he was always eager to explore new ways of thinking about America, frustrated only by those who allowed themselves to become lazy in their imagination. At 66, he was still tenaciously reasserting the relevance of American Studies and communicating in any forum he could, whether it was in a lecture or a casual conversation about James Baldwin.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, pillar of Transcendentalist writing and a favorite of Elliott's, once said that "every great and commanding moment in the annals of the world is the triumph of some enthusiasm." It is for his enthusiasm, his deep investment in his students and his field, above all other attributes of this remarkable man, that I will remember Emory Elliott.

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