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Richard L. Sears
Richard L. Sears, professor emeritus of the School of Art and Design, Born and raised in the small towns of the high desert of southern rural California, “Dick” grew up expecting life to be framed by mountains. The only child of Mildred and Harold Sears, the dreamy boy drew sailing ships and World War I-era airplanes, far beyond his experience, but not his imagination.
After service in Africa and Europe during World War II, Sears received an education thanks to the GI Bill. After graduate work at the University of Iowa and a Master of Fine Arts from University of California, Berkeley, he came to the Midwest as an instructor in drawing and painting at U-M in 1953.
He retired in 1989 as a full professor in the Department of Art and Design from the same institution. Sears focused on what mattered most to him - teaching students to see better, while trying to increase his own ability to perceive the spatial compositions of his environment in paint, pencil, sculpture and photography. Thousands of students benefited from his encouragement, corrections and reminders to measure, all delivered in a sneakily relaxed manner.
Upon retirement, Sears moved to Maine and returned to his real work of full-time seeing, painting and drawing, particularly enjoying the trees and rocks of Maine. Sears exhibited from Maine to California, often more appreciated by the eyes of other artists than by the public at large. His last show, which was in Bath, Maine, during the fall of 2012, contained numerous examples of his joyous and colorful works, particularly watercolors of recent years.
Sears is survived by his wife Robin A. S. Haynes of Bath, his daughters Anne L. Sears and Alison de los Santos, both of Kalamazoo, son-in-law Robert Mata de los Santos, and the family of close friends and former students who treasured him.
His memory is best honored, family members say, by remembering the ideas he taught and looking daily at the beauty of a loved one’s face, the fascinating and shifting movements of the open sky, and the simple lines and intricacies of all landscapes - none of which, like Sears, is ever only ordinary.
Albert Feuerwerker
Submitted by Ernest P. Young, professor emeritus of history, LSA
Albert Feuerwerker, who enjoyed a long and active career at U-M and who fashioned a distinguished legacy as a scholar of Chinese history, Born in 1927, he was raised in Cleveland, Ohio. He studied at Harvard University, earning his Bachelor of Arts degree in history, magnum cum laude, in 1950 and his Ph.D. in history and Far Eastern languages in 1957. He was a lecturer at the University of Toronto (1955-58) and a research fellow at Harvard (1958-60), and then came to U-M in 1959, where he spent the remainder of his career. He became professor emeritus in 1996.
At U-M, he was instrumental in the establishment of the Center for Chinese Studies. He served as its first director, 1961-67, and again from 1972 to 1983. He applied his leadership to making U-M one of the major centers in the country for Chinese studies and for Asian studies more broadly. He secured grants, facilitated the creation of new positions in other departments, helped to recruit faculty, supported the growth of the Asia Library, and negotiated a secure place for Asian studies among the university’s commitments. He was chair of the Department of History from 1984 to 1987 and served on several important university committees.
His professional activities outside the university were extensive. Among them was the presidency of the Association for Asian Studies, 1991-92. He served on various national committees over the years, sometimes as chair or co-chair, including the SSRC-ACLS Joint Committee on Contemporary China, the SSRC Subcommittee on Research on the Chinese Economy, the Committee on Scholarly Communication with the People’s Republic of China (of the National Academy of Sciences), the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, and the SSRC Committee on Exchanges with Asian Institutions. He served on the editorial boards of several major academic journals.
The main focus in his scholarly publications was on the Chinese economy in the 19th and 20th centuries, although he often ventured productively into other areas. He set a base-line for discussions of the role of the Qing state in modern economic development with his monograph, China’s Early Industrialization: Sheng Hsuan-huai (1844-1916) and Mandarin Enterprise (Harvard, 1958). His 1970 article, “Handicraft and Manufactured Cotton Textiles in China, 1871-1910,” was immediately the standard for research and argument about economic change in that period. He wrote general treatments of modern Chinese economic history that became the starting point for any further work and staples for graduate training in modern Chinese history. He also published lucid short books on 18th-century China, on rebellion in the 19th century and the foreign presence in the early 20th century. His publications pioneered the introduction to a Western audience of the scholarship of the People’s Republic of China. He edited several important collections of academic work on China, and was a co-editor of one of the volumes of The Cambridge History of China, a series in which his articles appeared more than once.
Feuerwerker’s contributions to both U-M and his field of scholarship have been enormous. He was a formidable figure in the arenas of his endeavors, colleagues say, adding that those who knew him will also miss him as a friend and colleague.
He is survived by his wife, Yi-tsi, and his children, Alison and Paul.
Robert F. Berkhofer Jr.
(November 30, 1931 – June 25, 2012)
died on the other side of America in California; but he was reared and educated in upstate New York and taught for most of his life in the Midwest.
With a Bachelor of Arts from SUNY Albany (1953) and a Ph.D. from Cornell University (1960), he taught at Ohio State University (1959-60), the University of Minnesota (1960-69), and the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1979-73) before accepting a professorship in the Department of History at U-M in 1973. Berkhofer was director of the U-M Department of American Culture from 1978-84, during which time he was elected to the national presidency of American Studies Association, serving for 1980-81. Throughout his career and these many moves, Berkhofer battled the disabling effects of childhood polio, aided by the support and stimulus of his late wife Genevieve (Zito), herself an American historian who, as a young woman, suffered lasting and serious injuries. So more remarkable was the mark they made. The wide range of friends who knew them during their years in Ann Arbor enjoyed their generous hospitality, lively conversation and pertinent gossip.
Ann Arbor also provided, in many respects, the fulcrum of Berkhofer’s historical development. The book that brought him a wide audience and reputation as a writer of critical history was the landmark “The White Man’s Indian” (Knopf, 1979), described when it first appeared as a “revelatory study of the absolute, seemingly ineradicable pervasiveness of white racism … (that) penetrates to the very heart of our understanding of ourselves.” Although at first glance different from what was to follow, this book showed a clear and unblinking insight into the biases that underlay and undermined historical discourse.
That insight led to “Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse” (Harvard, 1995), a theoretical work finally shaped in the critical environment of the University of California - Santa Cruz, where Berkhofer served as professor after retiring from Michigan in 1991. Colleaugues who heard its early stages as papers and discussions recognized that Berkhofer was mastering and rethinking the “Novissimum Organum” of postmodern historical analysis; and wide scholarly reception paid tribute to its theoretical and practical importance. Both this book and his last, “Fashioning History: Current Practices and Principles” (Palgrave MacMillan, 2008), elaborate his goal of enabling historians to “authorize new forms of representation.” Berkhofer chose to dedicate each of these books to his son Robert F. Berkhofer III, a medievalist; and his daughter-in-law Sally E. Haddan, a colonial Americanist - currently members of the Department of History at Western Michigan University.
Dr. Herbert Dean Millard
Dr. Herbert Dean Millard, who chaired the School of Dentistry’s first Department of Oral Diagnosis and served in that position for nearly 30 years, died Sept. 5, 2013 at the age of 92. Her family invites the public to a memorial service celebrating her life at 1 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 29, in the Kuenzel Room of the Michigan Union, with a reception to follow.
“We have lost a wonderful champion for nursing and a key innovator in the clinical nurse specialist role,” says UMSN Dean Kathleen Potempa.
After earning her nursing diploma from U-M and a bachelor’s degree in English, Jackson served in World War II as a Navy nurse caring for wounded sailors at a Hawaii military hospital. It’s there she developed a technique for turning burn patients to ease their pain. Those skills would later be recognized more widely when utilized at U-M.
In 1970, Jackson was a coordinator of the clinical nurse specialist initiation at University Hospital. In 1972 she became clinical director of surgical nursing and in 1976 she advanced to director of nursing, supervising more than a thousand nurses. She was known as an innovator in standards of nursing practice. She served on the hospital executive board and was involved in the design of the new hospital.
“Marjorie was a wonderful woman who contributed to the nursing profession in extraordinary ways,” says Margaret Calarco, chief of nursing service at U-M Health System and UMSN adjunct professor. “Her legacy lives on in our nursing community at UMHS.”
Jackson also was dedicated to education. She earned her master’s degree in clinical nursing in the late 1960s, when few nurses obtained graduate degrees. She became a fulltime faculty member at UMSN in 1980 and helped to develop the university’s clinical nursing specialist graduate program. Jackson is the author or co-author of books and many articles on nursing and management - including the importance of humor in effective management.
She was an ardent supporter of the U-M Center for the Education of Women. In 1989, she and her sister, Frances Daseler, created an endowed lectureship at CEW in memory of their older sister, Elizabeth Charlotte Mullin Welch. Given annually, the Mullin Welch lecture brings women of achievement and vision to address the U-M community.
“Marge Jackson was an incredible visionary leader in nursing,” says Carol D. Spengler, former director of Pediatric, Perinatal and Psychiatric Nursing at UMHS and a colleague of Jackson’s. “She was always ahead of her time and nursing at the University of Michigan benefitted from this. I liked Marge’s direct and honest communication, which was also often peppered with her great sense of humor. I admired her for her love of learning. Long after she retired, she continued to take courses so she would continue to learn. Marge was one of a kind and it was special to be a friend of hers. She will be missed but left a wonderful legacy for us to appreciate.”
Jackson received a commendation from the governor of Michigan during a ceremony with students and colleagues when she retired in 1987.
