Diana C. Matthias

1945 - 2020

Matthias, Diana C.
Today marks the passing of my magnificent mother, Diana C. J. Matthias, neé Diana Adams from complications of COVID. She was born in Woking, England, on 5 February 1945. Her father, Capt. Bryan Adams, fought in the First World War and, during the Second World War, served in Churchill's Cabinet War Room in London. Her mother, Pamela, met Capt. Adams in Geneva when he was attached to the League of Nations. Diana attended primary school in the small village school in Hacheston, Suffolk, where her parents had settled at the end of World War II. She subsequently studied for the English O-Level and A-Level exams in London where she lived with her half-sister Elizabeth, Lady Kennet. Elizabeth's husband, Wayland Young, Lord Kennet, was a writer and politician. As Elizabeth was twenty years older than Diana, her older children were more like Diana's siblings than her nieces. There were five of them, and the house that Diana loved sharing with them was where J.M. Barrie wrote "Peter Pan." Diana studied Russian at Edinburgh University and at the London School of Law, Language and Commerce. In 1966 she met John Matthias, in London on a Fulbright Grant, and married him in 1967. John became a professor of English at Notre Dame, and Diana worked first in the Art Department Slide Library and later, following an M.A. in Art History from Indiana University, as Curator of Education in the Snite Museum of Art. She developed a program called "Curriculum Structured Tours" during which students were shown the relevance of selected art works to some course they were taking. She later exported her program and method to other universities and won several awards including The Notre Dame College of Arts and Letters Award of Appreciation and the Outstanding Art Educator Award of the Indiana Art Education Association. Diana and her husband spent several years at Cambridge, England, where John was Visiting Fellow at Clare Hall and Diana worked at the Architecture Department library and Kettle's Yard, a small but famous Cambridge art museum. Diana retired from Notre Dame in 2010. She continued her studies independently and helped both former museum interns and a series of university mentees with their programs. Shortly after retiring she developed Parkinson's disease, which curtailed some of her activities but not her enthusiasm. She is survived by her husband, John, her daughters, Cynouai and Laura, and her grandchildren Ian and Leila Bendoly. Memorial service to be announced.