Robert Tracy

Robert Tracy, who served on the faculty for more than thirty years, passed away on January 16, 2020, in Berkeley. Professor Tracy was born on November 23, 1928, in Woburn, Massachusetts. He graduated from Boston College in 1950 with a degree in English, with Greek Honors. He went to graduate school at Harvard, where he earned an MA in 1954 and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature in 1960, specializing in Russian, French, and English literatures. In 1956, he and Rebecca Garrison Tracy married, and they remained together for the rest of his life. He joined the English Department at Berkeley as an assistant professor in 1960. A prominent scholar of eighteenth and nineteenth-century British and Irish literatures, Tracy was also part of a distinguished generation of Irish Studies scholars at Berkeley, a group that included Thomas Flanagan, Thomas Parkinson, Dan Melia, and Brendan O’Hehir. Along with Eve Sweetser, Melia, and O’Hehir, Professor Tracy was a founding member of the Celtic Studies Program on campus. In addition to his faculty position in the English department, he held several visiting appointments over the course of his long career: at Leeds University, Wellesley College, and Trinity College Dublin. He also served for a time as the co-director of the University of California Dickens Project. Furthermore, he was a member of the Academic Senate’s committee on Admissions, Enrollment, and Preparatory Education (AEPE) from 1977-1980. Professor Tracy retired in 1993.

During a long and productive scholarly career, one that continued well beyond his retirement, Professor Tracy published dozens of articles, primarily on British and Irish novels from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries, but also on a wide range of topics. A noted scholar of the works of Anthony Trollope, Tracy published a book on his works in 1978, Trollope’s Later Novels, and prepared editions of Trollope’s Nina Balatka, Linda Tressel, and The MacDermots of Ballycloran. Through editing and translating, he also brought the works of other authors back to life. He published new editions of Sheridan Le Fanu’s In a Glass Darkly and Flann O’Brien’s Rhapsody in Stephen’s Green: The Insect Play, and he produced an influential translation of the Russian Jewish writer Osip Mandelstam’s first collection of poems, Stone. In addition to essays on Trollope and Dickens, Tracy also wrote on Hamlet, Chekhov, and Mark Twain. He wrote inexhaustibly on Irish writers, such as Maria Edgeworth, James Joyce, W.B. Yeats, Máirtín Ó Cadhain, William Trevor, and Brian Friel. Many of his major writings on Irish literature appear in The Unappeasable Host: Studies in Irish Identities (1998), though he also published a number of influential essays after that book’s appearance.

After his retirement, Tracy remained an active member of the department’s and the campus’s intellectual community, giving numerous talks in the Bay Area, throughout the United States, and in Ireland. A giant in the world of Irish Studies, Tracy helped to found the Western chapter of the American Conference for Irish Studies, and he was a key member of a number of organizations, from the San Francisco-based Irish Literary and Historical Society to the International Association for the Study of Irish Literature. Every time an Irish writer or scholar visited campus, they wanted to visit with Bob and Becky Tracy. The kindness and generosity of the Tracys was legendary and lifelong: during Seamus Heaney’s year teaching in the Berkeley English department in 1970-1971, the Tracys and the Heaneys became close and fast friends, a bond that would remain firmly intact throughout the Nobel Laureate’s career until his own death in 2013. A valued and trusted mentor for younger colleagues (even those whose arrival postdated his retirement by a decade or more), Tracy remained an animating presence in the Berkeley English department well beyond his retirement.

Robert Tracy is survived by his wife, Rebecca Garrison Tracy; their three children, Jessica, Hugh, and Dominick; daughter-in-law Lisa James; and grandchildren Declan and Elta; and his sister Joan Tracy Heimlich. He was predeceased by his brother Richard.

Eric Falci
Catherine Flynn
Catherine Gallagher
2020