Ulrich “Uli” Knoepflmacher, the William and Annie S. Paton Foundation Professor of Ancient and Modern Literature, Emeritus, and a professor of English, emeritus, died at his home in Princeton on Sept. 4. He was 95.
Knoepflmacher joined Princeton’s faculty in 1979 and transferred to emeritus status in 2007. His research interests included Victorian literature and culture, English and American children’s books, 19th-century poetry and the English novel.
Ulrich Knoepflmacher
Robert Spoo, the Leonard L. Milberg ’53 Professor in Irish Letters and chair of the English department, recalled Knoepflmacher as “a towering scholar of Victorian fiction and poetry who brought to his subject a deep familiarity with traditions of realism, religious humanism, existential despair, culture and Romanticism.”
Knoepflmacher was among the first in his field to recognize the scholarly value of children’s literature and elevate its status in the academe. He examined texts by Rudyard Kipling and Grimm’s fairy tales with the same rigor as works by Emily Brontë and Mary Shelley. At Princeton, he developed the University’s first courses on children’s literature.
In addition to his pioneering scholarship, he was a “warm, witty, playful and nurturing” teacher, said Spoo, who earned his Ph.D. at Princeton in 1986 and took a Victorian poetry seminar with Knoepflmacher as a graduate student. “His disarming classroom presence helped students take light things seriously and serious things lightly.”
Susan Wolfson, professor of English, said she first met Knoepflmacher as a graduate student in his course on Romantic and Victorian literature at the University of California-Berkeley. They later became colleagues at Princeton in 1991.
“I taught a big lecture course with him and worked with him on several committees and was always impressed by his devotion, preparation, and range of expertise, from Chaucer through the 20th century,” Wolfson said. “He was also a talented and witty illustrator with strong satiric vibe. When he retired, we all wondered which six people we could hire to replace him … a fool’s errand. He was irreplaceable!”
Esther “Starry” Schor, the John J.F. Sherrerd ’52 University Professor and a professor of English, said Knoepflmacher “was delightful, whimsical, brilliant, versatile, mischievous and singular.
“From Munich to Vienna to Bolivia, to California and finally to Princeton, he cut his own path while teaching with his own brand of polymathic brio. He was a pioneer in the field of children’s literature: Uli took to heart the struggles of children to make sense of a chaotic world; to imagine elsewheres, out of time; and to live as freely and fully as possible. He never lost his sense of wonder,” Schor said. “Uli will be greatly missed.”
Knoepflmacher was born in Munich, Germany, in 1931, to Georg and Hilde Knoepflmacher. He moved to Vienna and later emigrated with his family to Bolivia after the Nazi Germany-led annexation of Austria.
He earned both his B.A. in architecture in 1955 and his M.A. in English in 1957 from the University of California-Berkeley. He received his Ph.D. in English at Princeton in 1961.
Before he was appointed a professor at Princeton, Knoepflmacher taught at the University of California-Berkeley from 1961 to 1978. He held visiting appointments at Harvard Summer School, the University of Tulsa, Johns Hopkins University, New York University, Mills College at Northeastern University and Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English.
Knoepflmacher was the author of six books on Victorian subjects, including “Ventures Into Childland: Victorians, Fairy Tales, and Femininity” (1998), and “Emily Bronte’s ‘Wuthering Heights’: A Study” (1989), and more than a hundred articles, essays and reviews. He also edited or co-edited 10 other books, including “The Endurance of Frankenstein” (1982).
His most recent book, “Victorians Reading the Romantics” (2016) is a collection of essays representing his scholarship across over five decades, edited by his wife, Linda Shires. He also edited editions of George MacDonald’s “The Complete Fairy Tales” in 1999 and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s “A Little Princess” in 2002. After retiring in 2007, Knoepflmacher wrote a self-illustrated children's picture book, “Franny, Randy, and the Over-the-Edge Cat Person,” as well as poems and drafted a memoir.
A ‘most profound mentor’
At Princeton, Knoepflmacher taught courses including “Children’s Literature” and “19th-Century Fiction,” as well as the graduate seminars “The Victorians” and “The Romantic Period.”
Lee Talley, now the founding dean of the John H. Martinson Honors College at Rowan University, earned her Ph.D. from Princeton in 1999 advised by Knoepflmacher.
“He was and always will be my most profound mentor,” said Talley. “If you were lucky enough to have him as a dissertation or paper reader, you could expect your margins to be encrusted with lively thoughts responding to what you had written along with illustrations all written in a tiny Brontean script.”
Ellis Hanson, a professor of literatures in English at Cornell University who earned his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1994, said Knoepflmacher “was a dedicated and witty teacher with a brilliant mind and an astonishing knowledge of all things Victorian.”
Hanson said it was his great fortune to have Knoepflmacher as a mentor: “I recall also the delightful cartoons he used to doodle for academic occasions, including sometimes on my dissertation’s drafts, and they of course endeared him to me forever.”
Knoepflmacher served on the editorial board of the University of California Press from 1973 to 1978 and academic journals including Children’s Literature, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, and SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900.
He was a member of the Kipling Society and the Modern Language Association, serving on the executive committee of the association’s Division on Children’s Literature. Knoepflmacher also taught children’s literature to New Jersey college and K-12 schoolteachers through Princeton’s Teachers as Scholars program and the National Endowment for the Humanities’ summer seminars.
His many honors include Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Humanities, American Council of Learned Societies, Rockefeller Foundation and National Humanities Center fellowships. In 2007, he received Princeton’s Howard T. Behrman Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities and the Children’s Literature Association’s Anne Devereaux Jordan Award for his contributions to the field.
Knoepflmacher is survived by his wife, Linda Shires *81; children Julie, Paul, Daniel and Alex ‘12, son-in-law Jay Drillings, daughters-in-law Liddy Leitman and Amy Veltman, and grandchildren Jared, Matthew and Hannah Drillings and Nora, Ivan, Lucy and Eli Knoepflmacher.
Donations in Knoepflmacher’s memory may be made to the Trenton Area Soup Kitchen (TASK) or Greenpoint Cats in Brooklyn.
