In Memoriam
George B. Walsh, associate professor and chair of the Department of Classical Languages and Literatures in the University of Chicago, died of cancer February 7, 1989.
The son of Bernard and Annie Walsh, George was born on 8 August 1946 in New York City, where he was raised and where he attended the High School of Music and Art. After taking his B.A. from University of Chicago in 1967, he entered graduate school at Yale University and began work, under Adam Parry, that would lead to his dissertation on the choral odes of Euripides. He returned to Chicago as an instructor in 1971, while finishing his degree, and was promoted to the rank of assistant professor in 1974 and associate professor in 1981. He became chair of the Classics Department seven months before his death.
As a classicist George Walsh devoted himself to teaching, to Greek poetry, and in recent years, to the union of computers and the classics. Conscious of teaching in a program to which he owned much of his education, he gave his energies freely to both graduate and undergraduate students and played a central role in the redefinition of the College curriculum. With the coming of the computer revolution and the spread of microcomputers, he began to find new paths for scholarship, as the force behind Chicago's Humanities Computation Center and a member of the University's Board of Computer Activities. The GreekKeys program that he developed is used around the world; at the time of his death he was collaborating on a number of projects with scholars at other universities and had recently been appointed to the Association's Committees on Preservation and Computer Activities.
George's earliest training was as a musician; and music's marriage of precision and freedom was always present in the criticism of Greek poetry that was his major scholarly work. His first book, The Varieties of Enchantment: Early Greek Views of the Nature and Function of Poetry (1984), pointed new ways to understanding the audience's emotional response to the performance of song from Homer to Euripides. work on his second book, which was to treat Hellenistic and post-Hellenistic poetics, was already far advanced when he fell ill: much of its contents will be published as articles.
He is survived by his parents, his wife, Susan Kastendiek, and his two children, Sam and Molly. His family, colleagues, and friends have established the George B. Walsh Memorial Fund to recognize distinguished graduate work in classics.
R.A. Kaster
University of Chicago