ROBERT MANKIN ’74

ROBERT MANKIN, a professor of British History at the University of Paris, died Jan. 28, 2017. He was 64. A member of Alpha Delta Phi, he received his degree cum laude from the College of Letters. He then spent a year at Johns Hopkins University before joining Yale University, the center of “deconstruction,” where he received his master’s degree in comparative literature in 1979, having credited Wesleyan as being the place where he acquired his intellectual identity: rigor of the philologist, taste for poetry, unlimited pluridisciplinarity, including sciences. He then went to Paris as a free auditor in philosophy at the ENS (École normale supérieure). Departing from the university path in the 1980s, he became a lecturer, a translator for UNESCO, a librarian at the U.S. Embassy, and a scientific publisher for an international organization. He returned to Johns Hopkins to study at the Humanities Center and under the direction of the historian of ideas J.G.A. Pocock. There he completed his Ph.D. on the English thinker of the Enlightenment Edward Gibbon, who remained a source of inspiration for him. At the age of 45 he entered the French university system, first with an ATER (teaching and research assistant) post at the University of Provence, near the village of Gémenos, where he also raised bees, and then, as of 1998, as lecturer at the UFR (training and research department) of English studies in Paris 7, then the Charles V Institute in the Marais district. It was at Charles V and Paris 7—Denis Diderot—that he made his entire academic career, becoming a professor in 2005 and director of the UFR for a short period of time (after his proficiency in Aix-Marseille in 2004). In 2009 he was appointed director of the Deutsch de la Meurthe Foundation at the Cité Internationale Universitaire in Paris, a graduate student residence and cultural center, which flourished under his leadership. He retained this position until his death. As a committed teacher, he shared his immense knowledge and his love for thought with all, from young L1 students to aggregates or doctoral students. It is this deep humanistic commitment that led him to work towards the creation of a multidisciplinary curriculum in Humanities at the Institute of Humanities in Paris. At the same time, from 2009 to 2013, he headed the Anglophone Culture Research Laboratory (LARCA), founded in 2008 by merging two pre-existing groups. He infused this group with an exemplary interdisciplinary dynamic. Having become a UMR (research center located in a public university that is affiliated with a French scientific and technical research establishment) on the basis of this work, LARCA as it exists today owes almost all to him. He also initiated the work on the documentary film that has just been completed, L’Abécédaire, filmé du LARCA, in which one can see his beautiful lesson in images, words and gestures. He was in the midst of working on an international project on the complete works of Edward Gibbon, when he became ill and could not continue with his colleagues from Oxford, Lausanne, Los Angeles, and elsewhere. He was truly the voice of Gibbon for all those who had the chance to hear him. Survivors include his wife, Danielle Torren, his son, and his mother, sister, and brother.