HOWARD BERNSTEIN

Howard Bernstein, a long-time visiting professor at Wesleyan, died of cancer on Jan. 15, 2007, at the age of 63. He earned a bachelor’s degree from the City College of the City University of New York and a doctorate in history from Columbia. Before coming to Wesleyan he taught at Brooklyn College, City College, York University, and Yale University. A world-renowned expert on the work of the German scholar G. W. Leibniz, he was a major contributor to a series of international conferences on Leibniz held in Germany in the early 1980s. He also published a number of works on Diderot, Einstein, and on Marxist philosophy. He taught at Wesleyan from 1979 to 2001 in a number of areas, including the College of Letters, the History Department, the programs in Educational Studies and Science in Society, and in Wesleyan’s Graduate Liberal Studies Program. He was also a major contributor to the Masters of Arts in Teaching Program. In addition, he supervised a large number of senior honors theses. For the past five years, he was a mentor and educator at Suffield Academy in Suffield, Conn. Among those who survive are his wife, Joan Leslie Bernstein, and their immediate family.