Joan Delaney Grossman

UC Berkeley Professor, the literary scholar Joan Delaney Grossman will be warmly remembered by her colleagues and students. She died on  February 9, 2025, in Oakland, at the age of 96.

She was born Joan Delaney on December 12, 1928, in Dubuque, Iowa, the daughter of Opal Delaney (née Desmond) and Frank Joseph Delaney. In her remarkable memoir, written in the last decades of her life, Joan described life in a small midwestern town in the 1930s-1950s and the difficult circumstances of her early years with the skill and acumen of a novelist. See: https://joangrossman.wordpress.com/.

“At age five, my life took a brief detour,” she wrote. “My mother left Dubuque and my father, taking me with her. She meant to start another life among her own people in Oklahoma. However, our arrival there was followed within weeks by her illness and sudden death. This turn of events made sure that my grandmother’s house in Dubuque would be my home for the next fifteen years.”

In a restrained tone and with dignified understatement, the memoir conveys a sense of loss and abandonment that lasted to the end of its author’s life.

In 1949, Joan, a graduate of the private Catholic school, Visitation Academy, in Dubuque, entered the order of the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary (BVM), a monastic community dedicated to education, retreating to live in its “Motherhouse.” Her memoir poignantly describes this other detour in her life. Joan remained a member of the order for the next nineteen years.

Educated at Clarke College, in Dubuque, Iowa (BA in English, 1952), she taught English for her order at Immaculata Highschool in Chicago, Illinois (1952-1957) and Clarke College in Dubuque, Iowa (1957-1959), until, in the summer of 1959, the order dispatched Sister Mary Consolata, as she was then called, to study Russian language, first, at Fordham University’s and Middlebury College’s summer schools, and then in the graduate program at Columbia, where she earned an MA in Russian literature in 1962. She next proceeded to Harvard, where she was awarded a PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures in 1967.

In the summer of 1962, at the height of the Cold War, Joan Delaney and a fellow student (a child of exiled Russian aristocrats) made a bold and adventurous trip to the Soviet Union, sponsored by an educational program, a rare occurrence at the peak of the Cold War. With sharp retrospective vision and gentle self-irony her memoir describes this trip of “a Catholic nun in disguise” through the infamous land of the atheists.

Her first scholarly studies were concerned with anti-religious propaganda in the Soviet Union, which was an important topic during the Cold War. The thoroughly researched and balanced articles—Joan Delaney, “The Origins of Soviet Antireligious Organizations” (in Aspects of Religion in the Soviet Union, 1917-1967, ed. Richard H. Marshall Jr. et al, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971); Joan Delaney Grossman, “Leadership of Antireligious Propaganda in the Soviet Union” (Studies in Soviet Thought 12:3, 1972) and “Khrushchev's Anti‐religious Policy and the Campaign of 1954” (Soviet Studies 24:3, 1973)—have been cited by scholars of Soviet culture over many years.

In 1968, Joan Delaney was offered a tenure-track position in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at UC Berkeley. While this brought an end to membership in her religious community, an abiding respect for her first mentors at the BVM remained with Joan throughout her life.

Over the years, Joan’s interests as a scholar evolved. Her first book brought together her academic interests in English and Russian literature in a study of reception: Edgar Allan Poe in Russia: A study in Legend and Literary Influence (Colloquium Slavicum, 1973). In 1998, the book was published in St. Petersburg in Russian. Joan’s second book, Valery Bryusov and the Riddle of Russian Decadence, a magisterial study of a major figure in Russian modernism, was published by the University of California Press in 1985. Joan participated in several collective projects, including Creating Life: The Aesthetic Utopia of Russian Modernism (Stanford University Press, 1994), co-edited with Irina Paperno. This collective monograph shows an essential continuity between turn-of-the-century modernist aesthetics and the utopian tendencies in early Soviet culture. The collection William James in Russian Culture, co-edited with Ruth Rischin, appeared in  2003 (Lexington Books). Another study of reception, this collaborative work reveals striking parallels and divergences between the intellectual and spiritual worlds of American and Russian culture. Joan Grossman’s final book, published years after her retirement, Ivan Konevskoi: "Wise Child" of Russian Symbolism (Academic Studies Press, 2010), is the first study in any language of a poet, thinker, and mystic who was considered for many decades the “lost genius” of Russian modernism. The Russian translation appeared in St. Petersburg in 2014.

Joan Delaney Grossman served the university in many administrative functions, Department Chairman (1976-1978, 1983-1984), member of the Academic Senate’s Committee on Committees (1980-1983) and Executive Committee (1987-1989), and much more. She retired in 1994.

Active in the profession, she served as Vice President and  President of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (1987-1989), Chair of the National Council of Area Studies Associations (1988-1989), and member of the Editorial Board of major Slavic journals, The Russian Review and Slavic and East European Journal. A champion of cross-cultural contacts, she was an active participant in the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX). Among major academic honors bestowed on her were the ACLS Fellowship (1971-1972), Guggenheim Fellowship (1978-1979), and NEH Fellowship (1992-1993).

In 1972, Joan Delaney married a Berkeley colleague, Gregory Grossman. Born in Kyiv in a Russian Jewish family in 1921, he grew up in Harbin, Manchuria, fought with the US Army in Europe in World War II, and later became a distinguished economist specializing in the Soviet economy. He remained her husband and intellectual companion for more than forty years, until his death in 2014.

Joan is survived by her stepchildren, Joel Grossman of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Amy Grossman Di Costanzo of Berkeley, California, six grandchildren and five great-grandchildren, with whom she maintained a close and devoted relationship.

A person of remarkable personal wisdom, dignity and courtesy,  a fine scholar and dedicated educator, she remained actively engaged with the world and with her Berkeley colleagues to the end.

Ronelle Alexander
Robert P. Hughes
Johanna Nichols
Irina Paperno