My scholarly genealogy runs through Richard S. Dunn. I was a student of one of his students. I guess you could say he was my scholarly grandfather.
I first met Richard Dunn in 1995 at the first Omohundro Institute for Early American History & Culture conference. I had just finished my first year of Ph.D coursework and decided to drive to Ann Arbor, Michigan to attend the conference. I knew very few early Americanists outside of my program at SUNY-Stony Brook and I was an introvert, so I thought it would be good for me to start attending gatherings of scholars in my field.
I was sitting alone on a bench outside the Horace Rackham Graduate School building on the campus of the University of Michigan when an older gentleman with white hair and a pointed beard approached me. It was Dunn. Apparently he took pity on this graduate student sitting by himself and decided to strike-up a conversation. I would later learn that such a move was not out of character for Richard. As founder and director of the Philadelphia Center for Early American Studies (now McNeil Center for Early American Studies) at the University of Pennsylvania he was always making young scholars feel at home. As soon as I told him I was at Stony Brook he reminded me that my doctoral mentor, Ned Landsman, was his graduate student at Penn. I already knew this, but the manner in which Richard said it made me feel like he was welcoming me into a rich lineage of early American historians. The conversation was exactly what I needed at this point in my academic journey. He asked about my research interests and said that he hoped I would apply for a fellowship at the Philadelphia Center when I got to the dissertation stage of my program. For some reason he always liked the fact that I was working on New Jersey history.
In 1997, when Richard learned that I received a grant from the New Jersey Historical Commission to write my dissertation, he invited me to join the community at the Philadelphia Center and gave me office space. The following year I won a two-semester dissertation fellowship at the Center. I thought I would need to decline the fellowship because my wife, Joy, was the Dean of Students at a boarding school in Stony Brook, Long Island and we had a one-year-old daughter. I didn’t think I could fulfill, in good conscience, the Center’s residency requirement. When I mentioned this to Richard, he said I could work in Philadelphia from Tuesday through Friday (or Tuesday through Thursday on the weeks when there was not a Friday seminar) and return home to Long Island for the long weekend. I took the offer, and though it was a tough year for my young family, we made it work. I was able to finish my dissertation and receive my Ph.D in 1999. Richard showed great kindness to me. He would occasionally stop by my office at the Center to make sure I was spending enough time at home. He was worried I was working too hard and neglecting my family back in New York. He occasionally invited me and other fellows to his Rittenhouse Square apartment for dinner.
During my years in Philadelphia, Richard liked to tell people that I was the first Philadelphia Center fellow who was a student of a previous Center fellow. (Ned Landsman was a member of the first class of fellows in 1978-79). He seemed to take great pride in the fact that the Center, which he founded, was now a multi-generational institution.
I know that his Penn graduate students and former Philadelphia/McNeil Center Fellows will have other stories about Richard. I did not meet him until the end of his career. But I will never forget his belief in me as a young early American historian and, more importantly, as a person with a life outside of academia that needed tending.
RIP.