Russell Alfred Fraser ’47
Russell Alfred Fraser ’47, Ph.D., died on March 10, 2014, in Queens (New York) Hospital after a long illness. He had retired to Honolulu, Hawaii, after serving as chairman of the English department at the University of Michigan. He grew up in Rockville Center, New York, and attended St. John’s Preparatory School. He was assigned to Dartmouth in the naval V-12 program, and majored in English, participated in debating and joined Theta Chi. He served in the Navy from 1944 to 1946, graduated in 1947 and went on to earn an M.A. from Harvard in 1949 and a Ph.D. in 1950. He taught English at UCLA, Duke, Princeton and Vanderbilt before moving to the University of Michigan, where he became chairman of the English department. He was honored with the school’s Faculty Outstanding Teacher Award. He was a Guggenheim fellow, a senior Fulbright-Hayes scholar and a Rockefeller resident scholar at Villa Serbelloni, Bellagio, Italy. In 1982 he was a visiting professor at the University of Hawaii. He was a Shakespearian scholar and a prolific writer, authoring 20 books and numerous essays. He loved baseball, especially the Dodgers and the Mets, early jazz and Scottish history. He enjoyed the climate and retirement in Hawaii. He is survived by his second wife and two children.
