Helena Wall

Helena Wall, emerita professor of history at Pomona College, succumbed to illness at her Claremont home on August 3, 2024. Those of us who knew and worked with Helena admired her deeply for her brilliant wit, tenacious and passionate spirit, devotion to her students, and abiding friendship. Her influence will extend far into the future through those she taught and mentored with distinction for 36 years.

Born in Queens, New York, Helena studied with John Demos at Brandeis University as an undergraduate and completed her PhD at Harvard University under the supervision of Bernard Bailyn. The dissertation became the basis of her book, Fierce Communion: Family and Community in Early America, a lively exploration of the private and communal lives of colonial Americans based on numerous cases from local town and court records. Throughout her career, her research focused on social and family history in Colonial America. Her work was supported through several National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships, as well as others from the Huntington Library (Mayer Fellow/Short-Term Fellow), the Harvard University Charles Warren Center, and the John Randolph and Dora Haynes Foundation. She received a Sontag Research Fellowship from Pomona and, in 1988-89, a Graves Award for early-career professors. Until retiring in 2020, she held the Warren Finney Day History Professorship.

Helena taught early American and U.S. History in the Pomona College history department from 1984 until 2020. Her courses inspired generations of students, several of whom went on to study history in graduate school and entered the profession. Helena was also a generous colleague with junior faculty and staff, mentoring and supporting them as they came through the history department. Among her courses were Culture of Early America, Revolutionary America, 1750-1800, The American Political Tradition, and Doing History. Students voted her a Wig Distinguished Professor Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2008. She was the founding Director of the Hart Institute for American History which made significant contributions to the intellectual life of Pomona College and the Claremont Colleges more generally. True to Helena's dedication to teaching and academic excellence and her wide-ranging intellect, the lecture series connected important scholars with students on topics such as Public Intellectuals/Public Issues, American Music, Supreme Court Decisions, American Science, The U.S. in the World, American Film, The Environment and American Society, and War and Society.

In retirement, Helena remained a voracious reader and a resource and interlocutor to many on the events of the day and the way in which history was useful in understanding them. She was a fan of the New York Yankees and devoted to her beloved dogs Buster and Maggie and cat Hillary.