Category Archives: Scholar

Zoe Dumitrescu-Bușulenga

Zoe Dumitrescu-Bușulenga was a Romanian scholar, essayist, political activist and professor at the University of Bucharest.
As a student at the university, she studied law (1939-43) and literature (1944-48), later earning her doctorate in 1970. Around the time a communist regime was established in her country, she went to the Soviet Union to study at the the Gorky Pedagogical Institute (1948-49). Dumitrescu worked as an editor at Editura de Stat from 1948 to 1949, and at Editura pentru Literatură until 1957. She was hired as teaching assistant at her alma mater in 1949, rising to assistant professor in 1951, associate professor in 1963, full professor in 1971 and chairing the department of universal and comparative literature in 1975.
Having been a researcher at the George Călinescu Institute of Literary History and Theory until 1957, she became the director in 1973. From 1970 to 1982, she served as vice president for the Social and Political Sciences Academy, and was elected a corresponding member of the Romanian Academy in 1974. In 1975, she became president of the Romanian National Committee for Comparative Literature, and was on the executive board of the International Comparative Literature Association (1973-79). She edited two magazines, Synthesis and Revista de istorie și teoria literară. Among her published books were Renașterea: Umanismul și dialogul artelor (1971), Valori și echivalențe umanistice (1973), Periplu umanistic (1980) and Itinerarii prin cultură (1982).
Dumitrescu joined the Romanian Communist Party in 1966, and was a member of the party’s central committee from August 1969 to November 1974. She served two terms in the Great National Assembly, representing Bucharest districts both times (1975-85). She was awarded the Order of 23 August, fourth class, followed in 1971 by the Cultural Merit Order, second class and by the special prize of the Writers’ Union in 1986 and 1989. She was also granted the Order of Cyril and Methodius by the People’s Republic of Bulgaria in 1977, and the next year became a commander of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic. She took the Herder Prize in 1988 and headed the Accademia di Romania in Rome (1991-97).
Late in life, she spent most of her time at the Romanian Orthodox Văratec Monastery and ultimately took the vows of a nun.

Continue reading

A. M. Dale

Amy Marjorie Dale, FBA was a British classicist and academi who published as A. M. Dale. Her research focused on Greek tragedy, especially Euripides and the metre of Greek tragedy’s choral songs and lyric parts, a subject area in which her work remains influential.
Her first academic post was at Westfield College in the University of London (1927-1929), followed by a job at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. During World War II, Dale worked in the Foreign Office, and spent her spare time translating Eduard Fraenkel’s edition of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon into English. She was later offered and accepted a lectureship at Birkbeck College, London. In 1952 she was appointed Reader in Classics, and in 1957 became a Fellow of the British Academy. In 1959, she was honoured with a Personal Chair in Greek and in 1962 was made an Honorary Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford. She became Professor Emeritus in Greek at the University of London when she retired in 1963.

Continue reading

Élisabeth Sophie Chéron

Although Élisabeth-Sophie Chéron is best remembered today as a painter, she was actually a true Renaissance woman, acclaimed during her lifetime as a talented poet, musician, artist, and academicienne. In her childhood, she was trained by her father in the arts of enamelling and miniature painting. Under the sponsorship of the prominent artist Charles Le Brun, she was admitted to the Académie Royale of Paris as a portrait painter in 1672. She exhibited regularly at the Salon in Paris, while also producing poetry and translations; she was fluent in Hebrew, Greek and Latin. Chéron’s literary talent was recognized in 1694 when she was named a member of Italy’s Accademia dei Ricovrati in Padua, and given the academician name of Erato, after the muse of lyric and love poetry.

Continue reading

Ina Coolbrith

Ina Donna Coolbrith was an American poet, writer and librarian, prominent in the San Francisco Bay Area literary community. Called the “Sweet Singer of California”, she was the first California Poet Laureate, as well as the first poet laureate of any U.S. state.

Continue reading

Irena Sawicka

Irena Scheur-Sawicka was a Polish archaeologist, ethnographer, and educational and communist activist who joined joined the Polish Workers’ Party during World War II.

Continue reading

Sylvia Townsend Warner

Sylvia Townsend Warner was an English musicologist, novelist and poet, known for works such as the novels Lolly Willowes and After the Death of Don Juan, the poetry collection Whether a Dove or a Seagull and several short story collections.

Continue reading

Shahjahan Begum

Shah Jahan Begum GCSI CI was the Begum (ruler) of the princely state of Bhopal in central India for two periods: 1844–60 (with her mother acting as regent), and during 1868–1901.

Continue reading