Photo: John Jameson/Princeton University
JAMES SEAWRIGHT, an artist known for interactive sculptures and an early faculty member of Princeton’s visual arts program, died Feb. 12. He was 85. Starting in 1974, Seawright spent 35 years teaching in the studios of 185 Nassau Street, mentoring generations of artists and filling leadership roles in Princeton’s arts community. In a University obituary, longtime friend and colleague Emmet Gowin described Seawright as a “comprehensively intelligent” person who “retained [his] sense of wonder throughout a long and full life.”
EDMUND KEELEY ’48, a renowned novelist, poet, and translator who directed the University’s creative writing program for 15 years, died Feb. 23 at age 94. A longtime professor of English, Keeley earned acclaim for his translations of Greek poetry and helped to create the Program in Hellenic Studies. As head of creative writing in the 1960s and ’70s, he brought the workshop model to Princeton, aiming to expose students to the process of writing and “how writers themselves think about literature and talk about it,” as he later told PAW.
HALE F. TROTTER *56, a mathematics professor and former department chair, died Jan. 17. He was 91. Trotter was associate director of Princeton’s Computer Center (and later, Data Center) for more than two decades. He also served as chairman of the CPUC’s Resources Committee, including in 1978, when the group made its first proposal for a new policy on University investments in South Africa. Trotter’s research interests included probability, group theory, knot theory, and number theory, according to a family obituary.
Photo: University of Rochester
BRUCE ARDEN, a computing pioneer who oversaw the creation of Princeton’s computer science department, died Dec. 8, 2021, at age 94. Arden, whose early career included service in the U.S. Navy and mainframe research at the University of Michigan, joined the University’s faculty in 1973. He chaired the electrical engineering and computer science department for more than a decade until it split into two departments in 1985. Arden left Princeton in 1986 to become engineering dean at the University of Rochester, a post he held until 1994.
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