Obituaries | Faculty

FRANCES HOPE GREENE AREY, a former librarian in the Science Library, died Feb. 4, 2006. Her husband, Sheldon C. Arey, and a brother survive.

FRANKLIN D. REEVE, a poet, translator, and former professor of Russian Language and Literature, died June 28, 2013. He was 84. A graduate of Princeton University, he received master’s and doctoral degrees from Columbia University. He taught at Columbia before joining the faculty at Wesleyan, where he taught full-time until he decided to devote more time to his writing and became a part-time faculty member. He published more than 30 books, including 10 volumes of poetry and translations of Russian authors. One book chronicled a trip to the Soviet Union in 1962 with Robert Frost on a good-will mission requested by President John F. Kennedy. At an early point in his career, while in graduate school, he began acting professionally, but gave it up because he feared that immersing himself in dramatic characters might erode his own poetic voice. He also founded the journal The Poetry Review. He translated Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s 1970 Nobel lecture and delivered the keynote address at the International Conference of Translators of Russian Literature in Moscow in 2007. His first three marriages ended in divorce. Survivors include his wife, Laura C. Stevenson; a son from his first marriage; a daughter and two sons from his second marriage; two stepdaughters; his sister and brother; and 18 grandchildren.

REGINALD BARTHOLOMEW, a senior diplomat and ambassador who taught at Wesleyan from 1964 to 1968 before joining the government, died Aug. 26, 2012, at age 76. Always interested in working overseas, he passed the Foreign Service exam as a sophomore at Dartmouth College. After graduating in 1958 with degrees in history and political science, he attended graduate school at the University of Chicago, where he received his master’s in political science, worked toward his doctorate, and taught, in addition to spending a year in France studying French politics. He then took a job teaching European government and politics at Wesleyan, where he met Leslie H. Gelb, a former New York Times reporter who worked with him later in the Defense and State departments, and who was teaching at Wesleyan as well. In 1968 Mr. Gelb persuaded him to join the staff at the Pentagon, from which he moved to and from various departments in different roles. During his long tenure, he served four presidents, negotiated for nuclear disarmament with the Soviet Union and for the preservation of American military bases in Europe, served as ambassador to Spain and Italy, and survived a bomb attack while ambassador to Lebanon in 1984. He received an honorary degree from Wesleyan in 1985. Among those who survive are his wife, Rose-Anne Dognin Bartholomew, three sons, a daughter, seven grandchildren, and his brother.

LAUREL F. APPEL, adjunct associate professor of biology, died Mar. 4, 2013, at age 50. A graduate of Oberlin College, she received a PhD in genetics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1993, when she moved to Connecticut. At Wesleyan, she also directed the Ronald E. McNair Program, which supports and nurtures first-generation college students and students in underrepresented groups for entry into graduate programs. She is survived by her husband, Wesleyan Professor of Biology Michael Weir, two children, her mother, two brothers, and three nieces and nephews. Her father died on April 19, 2013, six weeks after his daughter.