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In Memory

Barbara Johnson

Barbara Ellen Johnson was born in Boston, Mass. on October 4, 1947. One of two Presidential Scholars from Massachusetts in 1965, Johnson graduated from Oberlin College four years later and continued her education at Yale, where she received her Ph.D. in French in 1977.

Johnson passed away on August 27, 2009, in her home from cerebellar ataxia, according to her brother Bruce Pollack-Johnson. She was 61.

Eight years before, the acclaimed literary critic and translator had been diagnosed with the rare degenerative condition with effects similar to multiple sclerosis that made it difficult for her to speak and walk.

But Johnson—who taught at Harvard for 25 years—continued to advise dissertations and produce scholarly works years after her diagnosis, according to Pollack-Johnson.

The late professor of law and psychiatry in society at Harvard knew how to both speak with careful hesitation and opinionate with force, yielding a hard-to-forget intelligence and wit, according to Professor of English Werner Sollors.

He remembered watching his close friend and colleague respond to a comment made during one of her lectures: “She nodded very strongly, and said, ‘I agree completely with the opposite of what you’re arguing.’”

“She was an unbelievably smart close reader with a good amount of whimsy—very hard to replicate the kind of intellectual acumen that went into her quick sayings,” added Sollors, who also teaches in the department of African and African American studies. “She was just a powerhouse.”

In her 25 years at Harvard, Johnson worked for multiple departments, including the departments of English, comparative literature, women’s studies, and African and African American studies.

(adapted from Esther I. Yi, writing in The Harvard Crimson)

 

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