Michael J. Wolff *58

Michael Wolff, professor emeritus of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, died peacefully Nov. 5, 2016, at age 89.

Born in London, Wolff graduated from Cambridge with a bachelor’s degree in 1948 and earned a master’s degree in 1955. He earned a Ph.D. in English from Princeton in 1958. Wolff began his teaching career at Indiana University. While there, he founded Victorian Studies, one of the first interdisciplinary journals in the humanities.

Wolff was a founding father of the Victorian studies field. He started the Victorian Periodicals Review and was the founding president of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals. While working at the British Museum in the 1960s, he found an enormous volume of cheap 19th-century magazines and newspapers and saw them as the world’s first popular mass medium, and realized the value of studying them as literature.

After Indiana University, Wolff was a professor of English at UMass, Amherst for 22 years. He retired in 1992, and in 1994, he was the school’s first recipient of the Dethier award for teaching, research, and civility.

Wolff was predeceased in 2012 by Sara, his wife of 57 years. He is survived by three children and six grandchildren.

Graduate memorials are prepared by the APGA.