Robert Lowell Walters *55

Bob died in Richmond, British Columbia, Jan. 21, 2024, in his 103rd year after hosting friends and family to a Sunday brunch.

Bob was born Nov. 20, 1921, in Canton, Ohio. He earned a bachelor’s degree at Oberlin in 1943, and a Ph.D. in Romance languages from Princeton in 1955. He studied at the Sorbonne as one of the first Fulbright scholars. Bob joined the Department of French at the University of Manitoba in 1951 and stayed in Canada for the rest of his life. After 12 years of teaching at the University of Winnipeg, he transferred to the University of Western Ontario (now Western University) in London in 1963.

Bob’s area of expertise was 18th-century French literature, particularly Voltaire’s scientific writing popularizing Newtonian optics and cosmology in Cartesian France. Bob continued to make scholarly contributions after his retirement from teaching in 1987. Spending several months each year in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, he edited critical texts in four volumes of Voltaire’s Complete Works (Oxford, Voltaire Foundation), including Vol. 15: Eléments de la philosophie de Newton, and Vol. 17, Essai sur la nature du feu.

Bob is survived by his daughter, Mary Louise; stepchildren Peter, Kate, and Jeremy; and two grandsons.

Graduate alumni memorials are prepared by the APGA.