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Alexander Welsh
In Memoriam

Alexander Welsh

Professor Emeritus of English

UC Los Angeles
1933-2018

The English Department mourns the passing of Alexander (Sandy) Welsh on April 11, 2018.  Sandy was a beloved colleague in the English department for many years.  After his first academic appointment at Yale University, Sandy taught at the University of Pittsburgh and then joined the faculty at UCLA in 1980, returning to Yale in 1991, where he became Emily Sanford Professor Emeritus of English.

During the course of his career, he wrote many books, including “The City of Dickens” (1971), “Reflections on the Hero as Quixote” (1981), “From Copyright to Copperfield: The Identity of Dickens” (1987), “Hamlet in His Modern Guises” (2001), “What is Honor? A Question of Moral Imperatives” (2008) and “The Humanist Comedy” (2014).  He also edited a number of other books.

In addition, Sandy received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Rockefeller Foundation and the National Humanities Center. He was also a Harvard National Scholar and served with the U.S. Army in Germany.

Sandy is survived by longtime partner Ruth Yeazell and his children Molly Welsh Hoffman, Thomas Welsh and William Douglas Welsh.

Lowell Gallagher