Nicholas Xenos

1948 - 2025

Nicholas Xenos

Amherst, MA - Nicholas Xenos died on Wednesday, March 12th after a brief and acute illness. He died in the company of his beloved wife Lynn Peterfreund, and sons Ezra and Sam.

Born in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn in 1948 into the Greek immigrant community, Nick grew up in Plainview, NY, loving books, jazz, cars, and sports. He started his college education at Hofstra University before moving to NYU where he became a leader in the Vietnam Antiwar movement and found his calling in Political Theory via a course with the historian Arno J. Mayer.

He received a masters degree at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor where, in the first class he taught as a teaching fellow, on the first day, he met his future wife of 51 years.

He continued studying at York University in Toronto, and completed his PhD at Princeton University, studying with the political theorist Sheldon Wolin, who invited him to be the managing editor of "democracy," a journal. Along with that work, for two years Nick taught at Columbia University in the Society of Fellows. Ezra and then Sam were born in those years.

In 1984 the young family moved to Leverett, MA and Nick began his teaching career in the Political Science department at the University of Massachusetts. He was a passionate, dedicated, complex thinker, and a devoted teacher. Generations of students found their own passions and direction while learning the craft of reading, thinking, and writing from him. His long writing and publishing career produced numerous books, essays, and articles that added to the literature of Political Theory. He maintained deep friendships and ongoing conversations with his colleagues and friends.

Above all, Nick was devoted to his family. His sons came before anything else and he eventually added his daughter-in-law, Meike, and his three grandchildren, Hannah, Elie and Abe. He shared with them his love for baseball, coffee, travel, history, art, music, film, food and much, much more.

Most people who knew Nick would agree on these adjectives: intense, brilliant, funny, independent, non-conforming, shy but hugely expressive, witty, quick, elegant, impassioned, opinionated, curious. Not everyone might have known him as a gentle lover of birds and animals, an excellent chef, someone who did all the laundry (and perfectly), a wonderful homemaker…someone superb at crossword puzzles who would cry at the first notes of his favorite operas.

Donations in his memory can be made to the Amherst Survival Center.