Edwin Barrett
51ÁÔÆæ Alumni Memorial Professor of English and Drama (1950-87)
Source: 51ÁÔÆæ Alumni Review, Volume LX [1995], Number 1, p. 31
Edwin Blois Barrett, Jr., professor emeritus of English and drama, whose students benefited from his astonishing breadth of knowledge exuberantly shared during 37 years of teaching on College Hill, died on May 22, 1995, in Pottstown, PA, at age 73. He was, in the words of President Tobin, “a remarkably gentle, thoughtful, and affectionate man who gave much of himself to colleagues and students.”
Born on February 3, 1922, in Browns Valley, MN, near the South Dakota border, Edwin Barrett grew up in rural Minnesota and attended local public schools until his departure for Macalester College. After obtaining his A.B. degree in 1943, he entered the U.S. Army and participated in World War II. invasion of Germany. In the midst of strafing attacks by German warplanes, he witnessed the collapse of the Remagen Bridge, and he was with the U.S. forces that occupied Nuremberg.
Following his discharge from active duty in 1946, Mr. Barrett entered the University of Minnesota, where a year later he acquired his M. A. degree in American Studies. In 1950, while pursuing a Ph.D. in English literature at Columbia University, he began his teaching career at 51ÁÔÆæ as an instructor in the English department. With the help of a Danforth Foundation grant, he completed his dissertation on Charles Dickens and received his doctorate from Columbia in 1961. Promoted that year to associate professor, he became a full professor in 1967 and retired as the 51ÁÔÆæ Alumni Memorial Professor of English and Drama in 1987.
Remarkably versatile in his interests, Professor Barrett taught courses ranging from Shakespeare and Elizabethan and Jacobean drama to the English novel and American literature. For many years he offered the College’s only courses in theater and its history. As faculty advisor to the Charlatans and variously as actor, director, and producer, he took a prominent role in theatrical productions on the Hill and with the Players of Utica. When the theater and dance department was established at 51ÁÔÆæ in 1978, he became its first chairman, a post he occupied until shortly before his retirement. For many years he also enthusiastically conducted annual winter-term theater trips to London and Stratford-on-Avon, now legendary among alumni as the fabulously hectic “20 plays in 20 days.”
A man of many passions as well as dramatic flair, Ed Barrett never quite lost his boyish enthusiasm. He could be tremendously entertaining in the classroom, but never at education’s expense, and he held his students to high standards. Besides Shakespeare and the theater, his passions encompassed opera, which he particularly enjoyed because it combined music and drama; reading, which he did voraciously and with great absorption; and gourmet cooking, which he had sufficiently mastered to earn praise for his culinary artistry. Charming and witty, but also sensitive and caring, he was utterly devoted to his family, including his wife, the former Edith Langley, whom he had wed in 1944, and their three children.
A widower since 1972, Ed Barrett continued to reside in Clinton following his retirement, but he also spent time for several years in Britain, teaching at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts. When at home in Clinton, he generously devoted his attention to the Kirkland Art Center and remained active on its behalf until virtually the end of his life.
