Obituary |
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John A. DeNovoJohn A. DeNovo, retired Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin, died on 26 January 2000 in Madison at the age of eighty three. One of America's leading scholars of U.S. relations with the Middle East in the twentieth century, he left a significant legacy to the historical profession and to the universities at which he spent most of his career--Wisconsin and Pennsylvania State. Before arriving at Yale to work with Samuel Flagg Bemis in 1945, John received a B.A. from Knox College and an M.A. from the University of Minnesota. He served as an officer in the U.S. Navy from 1941 to 1945. He then received his Ph.D. in 1948, and in that same year married a Knox classmate and fellow historian, Jeanne Humphreys. The DeNovos spent the next sixteen years at Pennsylvania State University, where John advanced from Instructor to Professor of History. In 1964, the DeNovos moved to the University of Wisconsin, together with their daughter Ann, and son Jay. For the next seventeen years John taught at Madison, specializing in U.S. Diplomatic History. A dedicated teacher and scholar, John became a fixture in the History Department both as a faculty colleague and as a mentor to his graduate students. A summer cottage on Blue Lake in northern Wisconsin served as an escape and refuge for family and friends. John's Ph.D. dissertation, "Petroleum and American Diplomacy in the Near East, 1908-1928," in time grew into his best-known publication, American Interests and Policies in the Middle East, 1900-1939, published in 1963 by the University of Minnesota Press. It won a Prize Award in Phi Alpha Theta's biennial national book competition. He also published significant chapters and articles, with two of the latter appearing in the Mississippi Valley Historical Review and one in the Journal of American History. During his career John participated in numerous invitational conferences and symposia. He studied at Harvard and at Johns Hopkins on a Ford Foundation fellowship for study of the Middle East in 1956 to 1957, and twenty years later he was a visiting scholar at the U.S. Energy Research and Development Administration (now the Department of Energy). He was a founding member of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations and a long-time member of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association/Organization of American Historians and the American Historical Association. John retired in 1981 and remained active (learning Italian, continuing to play the piano, etc.) until suffering a debilitating stroke in 1992 that forced him to spend most of his time in a wheelchair. Though physically limited and living in a nursing home, he remained alert and in touch with others. John DeNovo was both a distinguished scholar and a true gentleman. He cared about people and was viewed in the History Department as a model of integrity, someone who always was trying to find, and helping others to find, common ground with those of different views. John cared especially about his graduate students, to whom he was both mentor and friend. Between Penn State and Wisconsin together, he directed thirty four masters theses and more than fifteen doctoral dissertations. He was thoughtful and painstaking in his own scholarship, and he was no less insightful and painstaking in the process of critiquing and improving the work of his students. Such interest coming from some major professors might have been daunting, but it was not for John's students. He lightened this potentially demanding load with his friendship and concern for his students' welfare, plus a wonderful, sometimes whimsical, sense of humor. His fondness for puns was legendary. On 25 March a memorial service was held in Madison to honor John DeNovo. Speaking on that occasion were a number of his former Ph.D. students, from both Penn State and Wisconsin, as well as family members, faculty colleagues, and others, who cared for him as a teacher, colleague, mentor, friend, father, and model human being. Richard Hume Werking Gerald K. Haines |
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