The scholar made the British poet and “multimedia artist” accessible to a wide audience.
莫里斯屋檐, an 英语 professor whose ceaseless and groundbreaking effort to digitize the illustrated poems of William Blake enabled widespread scholarship of the British poet’s work, 2月25日去世，享年79岁.
Family and friends describe his death as sudden and say a cause was not immediately known.
埃夫斯，谁持有大学的理查德L. 特纳人文学科教授，2010年至2018年, had been teaching two classes during the spring 2024 semester—Romantic Literature: Gothic Spirit, which explores the nexus of fantastical and terrifying works of British romanticism, 和媒体ABC, 对各种形式的媒体的历史介绍.
他一直在 澳门威尼斯人网上赌场 since 1986 and was known within the University community as much for his institutional knowledge as his devotion to the institution.
But Eaves was perhaps best known in academia for his scholarship on Blake and his pioneering preservation of Blake’s body of work in the internet age. 他的工作 威廉·布莱克档案—an online initiative he pursued with two colleagues at other universities—has been the subject of scores of books, 论文, 新闻报道.
布莱克常以诗人的身份被人们记住. 但他也是一位画家, 雕刻师, and printmaker who has been called the first multimedia artist for his hand-produced books of elaborately illustrated poems.
他工作的广度, 然而, posed a major challenge for students of Blake for nearly two centuries after his death in 1827. Students were seldom able to fully experience Blake because his artworks were scattered amongst collections around the world and his poems were typically reproduced without their illustrations.
Eaves and two other top Blake scholars—Robert Essick of the University of California and Joseph Viscomi of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill—sought to change that in the early 1990s when they began exploring the then nascent territory of digital humanities.
“我不记得我们是什么时候第一次听说互联网的，”伊夫斯告诉记者 澳门威尼斯人网上赌场民主党人和纪事报 在2004年的追捕中. “有人建议这可能是我们的一条出路. . . . 我们开始的时候根本不知道自己在做什么.”
不过他们还是搞清楚了，而且还搞砸了.
250美元,从盖蒂资助计划获得了1万美元的资助, they began securing access to thousands of pages of fragile and expensive Blake materials and mapping out the infrastructure for how to digitize them.
他们的创造, 威廉·布莱克档案, 于1993年构思，并于1995年开始发行第一个数字版本. The online archive enabled researchers for the first time to easily compare versions of Blake’s poems, 绘画, 并打印, 这在以前需要昂贵的旅行. The project later received support from major corporations and would become a model for digital humanities projects involving historical texts and images the world over.
在随后的几年里, Eaves further enhanced the archive by overseeing the digitization of every edition of 布莱克/画报季刊, a peer-reviewed journal devoted to Blake research that Eaves had coedited since 1970.
“我们是创建这个项目的先驱,维斯科米说, who recalls Eaves as a “first-rate Blake scholar” who was “crucial and central” to the initiative. “If you’re teaching Blake or studying Blake, you come to 威廉·布莱克档案.”
埃夫斯在西门罗长大, 路易斯安那州, 和高中恋人结婚了, 乔治亚州, 1964年，他还是长岛大学的一名学生.
When he earned his doctorate from Tulane University in 1972, it made news in his hometown. 标题是"本地人获得博士学位" 瓦希托公民 reported that Eaves had successfully defended his dissertation on “Blake’s Artistic Strategy.”
几十年后, Eaves described in the journal he edited how a rebellious spirit drew him to Blake as a graduate student. He wrote that giving up studying the likes of William Faulkner for Blake was a “self-shocking move,但他解释说自己“还年轻”, 不计后果的, and fascinated by pictures as well as texts and by processes as well as products.”
“毕竟这是60年代,他写道, 当人们开始做一些他们在更理智的时候可能会压抑的事情时.”
Eaves taught for 16 years at the University of New Mexico before joining the Rochester faculty, where he would establish himself as something of an elder statesman of the 英语 department.
在澳门威尼斯人网上赌场任职期间, Eaves served as chair of the department for eight years and sat on dozens of committees on a medley of issues, from those that advised on the use of technology in the classroom to theater study and university apparel.
“He had been on so many committees for so many years that his loss is a major loss for the department,” 奈杰尔·迈斯特尔罗素和露丝·派克艺术总监 国际戏剧项目他把埃夫斯称为导师和父亲. “他在过去几十年里大力建设了这个部门.”
同事和朋友会说“太棒了”,”“无礼,”“谦逊的,和“开朗”来形容屋檐.
他曾经对我说, 这是他对我说过的最好的话, “我们认真对待这项工作, 但我们不会太把自己当回事,’”莎拉·琼斯说, 的总编辑 布莱克/画报季刊他曾与埃夫斯密切合作.
Those who knew Eaves and his wife refer to them as an “inseparable” couple with discerning tastes in travel and food. 大家都明白, 他们说, 和他们一起出去吃饭的人都把晚餐的预订留给了他们. That could mean sitting down at a Michelin-rated restaurant or a hole-in-the-wall crab shack to write home about.
Eaves is survived by his wife; their two sons, Obadiah and Dashiell; and three grandchildren, 埃米琳, 以斯拉记, 和8月. 以斯拉是澳门威尼斯人网上赌场的一年级学生.
