Carter Curtis Revard

I remember first meeting Carter, a lifelong mentor and friend, at a medieval conference in Liverpool when I was a graduate student. My mother was there for the first international conference paper I ever gave in my life, and was worried because she thought when I delivered it I "made too many faces". Carter soothed her and spoke up for me: "You wouldn't want her to be a deadpan." There was nobody else like him; he continues to inspire me, as do my memories of him together with Stella - I am so glad to have known and to remember them.

Carter was one of my favorite colleagues in my field of medieval English literature, and also a deeply respected poet who helped my husband Jeff in his historical research on the twentieth-century history of American Indians. I first met him as a graduate student at my first conference, and ever since he and Stella were a joy to know, whenever we met, which was not as often as I wish it could have been. We will miss him so much!

Carter was my favorite professor when I attended Washington university in the late 1970s. I enjoyed his teaching so much in my sophomore History of the English Language class that I later enrolled in his Shakespeare section (where he told us that he was no Shakespearean scholar, but his wife was!) and then his Art and Literature of Native Americans.

To my thinking, he was the ideal professor, fascinatingly erudite and deeply moral, both "fear inspiring" and deeply caring.

The stories he shared about his own experiences helped us to understand that the writings of Chaucer and Shakespeare are as pertinent to our modern world as those of N. Scott Momaday and Leslie Marmon Silko.

Long after I forgot most of my teachers, I often thought of Carter with admiration and affection.