Obituaries | Faculty

Jerry Gafio Watts died on November 16, 2015 in New Jersey. Born on May 17, 1953, in Washington, D.C. the third child of Maria Wright Watts and James S. Watts, Sr. who are now deceased. He is survived by his spouse, Traci C. West, sister Brenda M. Watts, brother, Robert A. Watts; nephews: James Watts III, Gregory Watts, Michael Watts, Shawn Sloan and Kyle Sloan, and a niece, Ravae M. Perkins; an aunt Evelyn Foster; and a host of beloved in-laws, cousins, students and former students, friends, and academic colleagues.

Watts graduated from DeMatha Catholic High School in Washington, D.C. (1971), earned a B.A. from Harvard University (1975), and his PhD in Political Science from Yale University (1985).

Watts served as an Assistant professor of Government and Afro-American Studies at Wesleyan University (Middletown, CT), an Associate and full professor of American Studies at Trinity College (Hartford, CT), a professor of English at CUNY Graduate Center (NY, NY). He was the author or several books and many articles, most notably, Heroism and the Black Intellectual: Reflections on Ralph Ellison, Politics, and Afro-American Intellectual Life (1994) and Amiri Baraka: The Politics and Art of a Black Intellectual (2001).

Watts was best known for his loving commitment to mentoring his students; kind and generous spirit to workers across class and racial/ethnic lines, scathing critiques of white supremacy in U.S. racial politics and academia, iconoclastic texts on politics and intellectuals; scandalous wit, humor, and storytelling; love for his family; and his insights about the political constraints, spiritual tortures, and inspirations of genius that can be embedded in the vocation of a political intellectual. He will be sorely missed by all who loved him and had the chance to learn from him.

A memorial service will be held on Saturday December 5, 2015 at 6:15 pm at the NY Society for Ethical Culture, 2 West 64th Street, New York, NY. A reception will follow. Everyone is invited to this time of storytelling and celebration of his life.

In lieu of flowers please send donations “In honor of Professor Jerry G. Watts” to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, 40 Rector Street, 5th Floor, New York, NY 10006 or the United Negro College Fund, 1805 7th Street, NW, Washington, DC 20001.

JOHN S. “JACK” McINTOSH, Foss Professor of Physics, Emeritus, died Dec. 13, 2015, at age 92. He received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. from Yale University, and came to Wesleyan in 1963. An expert on sauropod dinosaurs, as well as a physics professor and department chair at Wesleyan, he inspired countless students, colleagues, friends, and family. He is known for determining the correct skull of Apatosaurus at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, and in 2010 was honored by having a newly discovered species named Abydosaurus mcintoshii. He flew reconnaissance in World War II before becoming a theoretical nuclear physicist whose lifelong avocation was paleontology. Survivors include a sister-in-law, four nieces, four nephews, and numerous great-nieces and nephews.

WILLIAM FIRSHEIN, Daniel Ayres Professor of Biology, Emeritus, died Dec. 7, 2015. He was 85. After receiving his B.S. from Brooklyn College and his M.S. and Ph.D. from Rutgers University, he came to Wesleyan in 1958 and taught for 47 years. He was elected to Sigma Xi. An active scholar who was awarded research grants totaling more than $2 million over his career, he investigated the molecular biology of DNA replication cell division in Bacillus subtilis and Escherichia coli and their plasmids. In his most recent book, The Infectious Microbe, published in January 2014, he discussed the relationship between humans and viruses and illustrated how pathogens are spread. This book was based on a very popular general education course that he taught for decades. He was a founding member of the Molecular Biology and Biochemistry Department, and served as chair of MB&B for seven years, and as chair of Biology for three years. He was instrumental in the establishment of the Ph.D. programs in Biology and MB&B. Molecular Biology and Biochemistry has awarded the William Firshein Prize in his honor each year to the graduating student who has contributed the most to the interests and character of the MB&B department. His friend, Anthony Infante, Professor of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry, Emeritus, said, “He was a true friend to his colleagues and always available for effective useful advice and guidance to the young faculty.” His wife, Anna, and five children survive.

JON K. BARLOW, Professor of Music, Emeritus, died Dec. 15, 2015. He was 73. After receiving his B.A. and M.A. from Cornell University, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, he joined the faculty at Wesleyan and taught in the music department for 34 years. Grounded in Western music history, he expanded his horizons geographically and conceptually, constantly creating innovative courses that attracted serious students. Many of his students went on to become established composers, performers, musicologists, and ethnomusicologists. He was very proud of the interdisciplinary courses he taught, including a course on the metaphysics of baseball. He also co-taught courses with Joe Reed and Bob Rosenbaum, focusing on the films of John Ford, the novels of William Faulkner, and the music of Charles Ives. These courses reflected not only his love of teaching, but also his belief that his best teaching occurred while he was learning and that Wesleyan was a special place to have offered him the opportunity to learn alongside and from his own students. According to his friend and colleague, Mark Slobin, Winslow-Kaplan Professor of Music, “He was a brilliant and original pianist who collaborated with eminent composers and performers, mostly at Wesleyan, and did individualistic scholarship on figures ranging from the medieval Guido d’Arezzo to the New Englander Charles Ives.” He maintained an active program of research in retirement. Survivors include his wife, Muriel Barlow, two children, a foster daughter, and two grandchildren.

Carl E. Schorske, who taught at Wesleyan from 1946–1960 before moving to UC Berkley and eventually Princeton, died Sept. 13, 2015. He was 100 years old. A scholar whose essays centered on Vienna at the turn of the 20th century as the site of the origin of modernist thinking, he returned to Wesleyan in the 1970s as a visitor at the Center for Humanities. He won a Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 1981 for his collection of essays, Fin de Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (1980), and was the recipient of a MacArthur fellowship, or “genius grants.”

Other books include German Social Democracy, 1905–1917 (1955) and Thinking With History: Explorations in the Passage to Modernism (1998).

Wesleyan president Michael S. Roth ’78 recalls that he had signed up for “Carl’s Vienna seminar” in the spring semester of his first year at Wesleyan.

“Carl was an extraordinary teacher—erudite, humane and sensitive to the different ways that students learned,” writes Roth. “He was an activist, a scholar and a pedagogue. These aspects of his personality all seemed to work together in his intellectual practice as a scholar-teacher. When he was teaching a subject he was deeply engaged with as a scholar, he said he ‘was really cooking with gas.’ He took culture seriously, and he took enormous pleasure in it, too. That seriousness and capacity for pleasure was something that his students were so fortunate to share in.”

Among those who survive are a daughter, three sons, three grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren. He was predeceased by a son, Stephen, in 2013, and his wife of more than 70 years, Elizabeth Rorke Schorske, died last year.

Eugene Klaaren, former associate professor of religion, passed away Oct. 17, 2015, at the age of 78. Gene taught at Wesleyan from 1968 until he retired in 2006.

His courses introduced students to central Christian thinkers in the history of theology and philosophy, from Martin Luther to Søren Kierkegaard, John Calvin to David Hume and Jonathan Edwards, and Friedrich Schleiermacher to Friedrich Nietzsche. Over the years he broadened his academic interests, regularly visiting Africa to study indigenous African religions as well as Christian theological formations that combined political action and religious belief and practice. But his great passion was in showing the forms of belief that sustained secularity and the vitality of the theological discipline from the early modern through the postmodern age. This dynamic intertwining of secular sciences and the religious imagination is captured in the title of Gene’s highly regarded book, Religious Origins of Modern Science: Belief in Creation in Seventeenth Century Thought.

Klaaren’s friend, Rick Elphick, Professor of History, Emeritus, who co-taught with him and worked with him in numerous academic settings, says: “Gene was a profoundly thoughtful teacher. He had a near-encyclopedic command of many literatures. When asked a question in the classroom, a seminar, or after a lecture, he would fall silent for 30 seconds and then come forth with an answer masterfully weaving insights from far-flung regions of his inner archive.”

He leaves his wife of 54 years, the Rev. Mary Decker Klaaren, two sons, a daughter, two sisters, a brother, seven grandchildren, and numerous nieces and nephews.

Jason Wolfe, 73, professor of biology emeritus, died Dec. 23, 2014. He joined the Wesleyan faculty in 1969 after receiving his BA from Rutgers and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, and completing two post-doctoral fellowships at Kings College, University of London, and Johns Hopkins. He taught cell biology, human biology, biology of aging and the elderly, and structural biology at Wesleyan for 39 years.

In his research, Wolfe asked big questions about how reproduction and aging are regulated. With funding from NIH and NSF, he produced an enviable body of work published in the major cell biology journals—always mentoring undergraduates and graduate students with compassion and insight. He led the effort that resulted in Wesleyan’s first Howard Hughes Medical Institute Grant for Undergraduate Life Science Education, establishing a program that has provided decades of support for hundreds of undergraduates. In retirement, he twice offered his popular general education course in human biology and published his last Biology Open research paper in 2014 with four former Wesleyan undergraduate co-authors.

He is survived by his wife, Vera Schwarcz, the Mansfield Freeman Professor of East Asian Studies, professor of history, as well as three children and five grandchildren.

George R. Creeger, 89, professor of English, emeritus, died Nov. 1, 2014. He joined the Wesleyan faculty in 1951 after receiving his B.A. at DePauw University, and his M.A. and Ph.D. at Yale. He taught American literature in the English Department for nearly 50 years. An expert on romantic poetry—particularly Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, and Byron—and on the works of Herman Melville, he was also a generalist who brought some of his other passions into the classroom through courses on Early Connecticut Houses and Opera as Myth and Literature. He served as Dean of the College from 1971–1973 as well as chair of the faculty from 1991–1992. He was a brilliant teacher whose deep resonant voice was instantly recognizable, and he was much beloved by a devoted following of students. He was the first recipient of the Binswanger Prize for Excellence in Teaching when it was inaugurated in 1993.

He is survived by a son, Christopher (Kit); his daughter, Katie; and two grandsons. He is predeceased by his wife, Elva, and by a son, Carl.