George Panichas, a faculty member in the Department of English from 1962 to 1992, passed away on March 17. He was 79.
A prodigious scholar and critic, Panichas wrote books on Dostoevsky, Conrad, Lawrence and Irving Babbitt; he edited works by Simone Weil, Russell Kirk, and Austin Warren; and he was also a prolific literary essayist. In addition, he served as editor for Modern Age: A Quarterly Review, which he took over from Russell Kirk in 1982. His work was well received: Walter Jackson Bate, for example, described his book on Babbitt as "a penetrating study of the most influential humanist of the twentieth century."
William Peterson and Jackson Bryer, emeriti professors who knew Professor Panichas, have shared their memories of Professor Panichas below.
From Bill Peterson:
"George Panichas was a brilliant and charming man. I got to know him quite well through the years, and I was always impressed by his intellectual and moral passion. Many of my students also told me about his compelling performances in the classroom. Only rarely are we academics able to see a colleague actually teaching, but I once got a glimpse of this side of George's personality back in the early eighties, when I was in charge of a series of lectures at St. Andrew's Church in College Park. The theme of the series was "Religion and the Arts," and I invited George to participate. George's lecture struck me as exceptionally complex and demanding. My first thought was, "Oh my, he's talking way over their heads." But it was delivered with a truly astonishing moral fervor, and I remember that afterwards George was surrounded by a large crowd of enthusiastic admirers. In private he was quiet and modest, yet behind a lectern he became a spellbinder."
From Jackson Bryer:
"George was the consummate professional, almost monk-like in his total dedication to his research and teaching. He was an enormously popular teacher because of his vast store of knowledge and his meticulous approach to preparing his classes. As a colleague, he was always interested in what you were working on, while never being shy about telling you of his own research. He was very much old school and old world, never really shedding his heritage as the member of a Greek immigrant family (every vacation he would go home to his family in Massachusetts, as I recall). He wore a coat and tie to teach, even into the period when such formalities were beginning to be abandoned. I suppose the "bottom line," as it were, was that, while he held us all to a very high standard as teachers and scholars, he never held us to any standard that he himself could not meet."
A link to the obituary in the Washington Post.
