Alison SCOTT-PRELORENTZOS

Alison Scott-Prelorentzos, born June 16, 1930, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, Great Britain, died May 26, 2023, in Edmonton at CapitalCare Grandview. The only child of Alice and Blackett Scott of Fawdon, Alison was awarded state scholarships to the Central Newcastle High School for Girls. She passed the entrance exam for St. Hilda's College Oxford, where she received an Honours BA in German, followed by an MLitt from the University of Oxford. In 1953, she came to Canada to study at Queen's University on a prestigious Samuel McLaughlin Graduate Teaching Fellowship and finished only two years later as the Department of German's first PhD, with a thesis that received the Prize of the English Goethe Society in 1954. Alison taught in the Department of German at Queen's after her Ph.D. and as a sessional lecturer at the University of British Columbia in 1958-1959. In Vancouver, she also worked for the BC Chapter of the Adoption Committee for Aid to Displaced Persons in Europe, which helped resettle refugees. In 1959, Alison accepted a position as assistant professor in the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, where she would teach for the next 26 years, rising to full professor in what became the Department of Germanic Languages. She took early retirement in 1985. During her academic career, Alison became known as leading expert on the eighteenth-century German playwright Gotthold Ephraim Lessing: her scholarly articles on his themes of tolerance versus anti-Semitism were widely cited. She was an active member of Canadian and international academic organizations, including the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (whose journal Lumen carries the name she suggested). Beyond her professional accomplishments, Alison demonstrated a capacity for cultivating and maintaining friendships across decades and continents. She had a special affection for children in general and her goddaughters in particular, to all of whom she was known as "Auntie Alison." She was an indefatigable letter-writer who never forgot a birthday or an anniversary and when she was not travelling, she attended the family gatherings of her many friends or received them at the apartment in Terrace Towers where she lived for some 50 years. A traveller who visited almost every continent, Alison has a special fondness for Greece, which she visited frequently and where she also learned to read and speak fluent modern Greek. There she met a widower and retired hotelier named Salvos Prelorentzos, who moved to be with her in Edmonton, where they were married in 1977. After her retirement in 1985 and until his death in 1995, they divided their time between her apartment in Edmonton near the university and his apartment in Marousi, outside of Athens. The Salvos Prelorentzos Peace Award was established in 1996 by Project Ploughshares to recognize Edmontonians each year who have made significant contributions to peace and human rights. Since 2022, the prize is given out by the Edmonton Interfaith Centre for Education and Action (EICEA). In the years following Salvos's death, Alison remained active, continuing to visit family and friends in Canada and Europe, attending scholarly conferences and serving on the executive of the Friendship Guild of All Saints' Anglican Cathedral in Edmonton and the University of Alberta's Association of Professors Emeriti. She was also an active member of EICEA. After a series of strokes, Alison moved to Capital Care Grandview in 2018, where she lived until her death from Covid. Alison is survived by her stepdaughter, Margie Prelorentzos of Athens, Greece. Though she was an only child who married too late to have children of her own, in a very real sense, Alison is also survived by her goddaughters, Emma Nimmo of Edmonton, Joanna Forsyth of Issaquah, Washington, and Shirley Forster of Spain. She was predeceased by her goddaughter, Naomi Schulze of Edmonton. A memorial service for Alison will be held in Edmonton on May 25, 2024, at All Saints' Anglican Cathedral, 10035-103 Street, at 10:30 a.m. At her request, she was cremated and her ashes will be spread with those of her late husband, Salvos, on the Island of Tinos in Greece, where he was born.