2/28/2022
Richard Dunn, Eminent Historian of Early America and Caribbean, Dies at 93
Historians in the Newstags: obituaries, early American history
Richard S. Dunn, 93, formerly of Philadelphia, an award-winning professor emeritus of American history at the University of Pennsylvania, director emeritus of the groundbreaking McNeil Center for Early American Studies, co-executive officer emeritus of the American Philosophical Society, and a prolific researcher and author, died Monday, Jan. 24, of congestive heart failure and COVID-19 at home in Winston-Salem, N.C.
A renowned expert on early American and Caribbean history, he was a professor at Penn for 40 years. He chaired the school’s history department from 1972 to 1977, helped recruit its first tenured women faculty members, and won the school’s 1993 Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching.
He served on several committees that shaped the School of Arts and Sciences and the university as a whole, and was named Penn’s first Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols professor of American History. The history department created the Richard S. Dunn Award for Distinguished Teaching after his retirement in 1996.
Professor Dunn formed the Philadelphia Center for Early American Studies, now the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, at Penn in 1977, and served in leadership roles until 2000. The center’s Richard S. Dunn fellowship recognizes excellence in scholarship, and its head of staff holds the Richard S. Dunn directorship.
comments powered by Disqus
News
- What Happens When SCOTUS is This Unpopular?
- Eve Babitz's Archive Reveals the Person Behind the Persona
- Making a Uranium Ghost Town
- Choosing History—A Rejoinder to William Baude on The Use of History at SCOTUS
- Alexandria, VA Freedom House Museum Reopens, Making Key Site of Slave Trade a Center for Black History
- Primary Source: Winning World War 1 By Fighting Waste at the Grocery Counter
- The Presidential Records Act Explains How the FBI Knew What to Search For at Mar-a-Lago
- Theocracy Now! The Forgotten Influence of L. Brent Bozell on the Right
- Janice Longone, Chronicler of American Food Traditions
- Revisiting Lady Rochford and Her Alleged Betrayal of Anne Boleyn