James A.W. Heffernan *64

Jim died of metastatic prostate cancer in Hanover, N.H., July 21, 2024. He was 85.

Born in Boston in 1939, he earned a B.A. from Georgetown in 1960 and his Ph.D. in English from Princeton in 1964.

Jim began his teaching career at the University of Virginia. After joining the Dartmouth English department in the fall of 1965, he taught literature until retiring in 2004 and thereafter continued writing about it. He was appointed the Frederick Sessions Beebe Professor in the Art of Writing.

Jim served as director of an NEH summer seminar on English Romantic literature and the visual arts at Dartmouth in 1987 and 1989. In 1989, he directed a research conference on “Representations of the French Revolution in Literature, Art, and Historiography.” He received an NEH fellowship for a book-length project on the poetics of ekphrasis.

He was the founding editor of Review 19, an online review of new books on 19th-century English and American literature. He served on the board of trustees of the Vermont Academy and was a council member of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics.

Jim is survived by his wife, Nancy; his children, Andrew and Virginia; and his four grandchildren.

Graduate memorials are prepared by the APGA.