Edward A. Riedinger

RIEDINGER Prof. Edward A. Riedinger, a specialist in international educational advising and Brazilian studies, has died. He was a member of the library faculty and the history department at The Ohio State University. Prof. Riedinger was born in Cincinnati, Ohio on March 26, 1944 and raised in Indianapolis, Indiana. Most of his adult life he spent abroad, primarily in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He was a faculty member at various universities in Brazil, Mexico, and the United States. From 1979 to 1988, he was Educational Advising Officer of the Fulbright Commission of Brazil at the American Consulate-General in Rio de Janeiro. There he developed a national coordination of advising centers for Brazilians wishing to study and do research in the US. He organized a regional association, the Working Group of US Overseas Educational Advisers in South America. Prof. Riedinger then aided in the formation (1985) of a world-wide organization of advisers, the Overseas Educational Advisers Group (OSEAS) within the National Association for Foreign Student Affairs (NAFSA) the world. He was a member of the executive organizing committee for the Brazilian Studies Association (BRASA), at the Univerity of New Mexico. He served as its first secretary, 1994-1996, and on the program committee of its annual conferences, editing their "Proceedings". Prof. Riedinger was the author of over 100 articles, reviews, and books, written in English and Portuguese. On the eve of the first direct, civilian presidential election (1988) in Brazil since the military coup of 1964, he published "Como se faz um presidente (The Making of a President)". The work described the presidential election in 1955 of Juscelino Kubitschek, the builder of Brasilia. Prof. Riedinger served as President Kubitschek's private secretary for English correspondence from 1972 to 1976. Other books by Dr. Riedinger included "Where in the World to Learn", which demonstrates the applications of information management to advising, the "Turned on Advising", a guide to computer and video resources for advising. He lectured, gave workshops, and did consulting on educational advising throughout Latin America and Europe. He studied in Catholic seminaries in Indiana. He recieved MA and PhD degrees in history from the University of Chicago and a masters in library and information science from the University of California, Berkeley. He pursued postgraduate work at Harvard, Oxford, and Cambridge Universities. A recipient of numerous awards from Brazilian and US government and private agencies, Prof. Riedinger was a Ford Foundation Fellow, Fulbright Scholar, and a National Endowment for the Humanities and a Tinker Foundation grantee. At the time of death he was completing "Renaissance in the Tropics", a history of modern Brazilian culture. Burial was by cremation. Contributions in his memory may be made to the Human Rights Campaign of Washington, DC. He is survived by a brother, Charles A. Riedinger Jr. of Indianapolis.