Former English department chair dies at age 66

During his 17 years as a faculty member at Princeton, Elliott also served as chairman of the Program in American Studies and chaired the Department of English for three years before leaving to teach at UC Riverside in 1989.

Elliott also received the Distinguished Service Award for his contributions to the Program in the Study of Women & Gender in 1987.

“Emory was a wonderful colleague and a very fine chair of the English department,” English professor Lawrence Danson said. “His dedication to American studies was unflagging. He was a kind, generous and fine man who will be very much missed.”

English professor emeritus William Howarth, who was on the hiring committee that offered Elliott a job at the University, said he was close friends with Elliott.

“He was a very rare kind of person — unpretentious, straightforward, almost always friendly and pleasant,” Howarth said. “You don’t often get colleagues like that.”

Calling Elliott a “rain-maker” and “someone who could make anything happen,” Howarth explained that as chair of the department, Elliott hired some of the English department’s first female and minority faculty members.

“[He] helped modernize the department … [and] set standards of diversity and inclusion in his professional life and his personal life constantly,” Howarth said.

English professor emeritus John Fleming GS ’63 said he was “terribly shocked” to hear of his former colleague’s death.

“He was a very important and influential professor here,” Fleming said. “He was one of the outstanding scholars of American literature in the country.”

English professor emeritus Edmund Keeley added that Elliott was a “conscientious and responsible chairman” and “a man of integrity” whom people trusted.

“I knew his reputation was strong as a teacher,” Keeley said. “He was one of the stars of the department.”

Elliott began directing the Center for Ideas and Society research center in 1996, and in 2001, the University of California named him a University Professor, an honor that has so far only been given to 36 people.

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Among the hundreds of publications he wrote were “Power and the Pulpit in Puritan New England” in 1975 and “Revolutionary Writers: Literature and Authority in the New Republic” in 1982, both influential books on early American literature.

He also edited the “Columbia Literary History of the United States,” which won an American Book Award.

Elliott was born in Baltimore on Oct. 30, 1942, and he earned his bachelor’s degree in English at Loyola College, his master’s degree in English at Bowling Green State University and his doctorate at the University of Illinois.