Van Akin Burd
Melvin Van Akin Burd (19 April 1914 – 7 November 2015) was an American academic and Distinguished Professor Emeritus of the Department of English at the State University of New York College at Cortland.
Biography
Van Akin Burd was born in the City of Miami, Florida, the only son of Melvin Sorrel, a building contractor, and his wife Elizabeth (née Van Akin Burd).[1] He did his undergraduate work at the University of Chicago in the 1930s. It was at this time that Akin Burd came in contact with the work of John Ruskin through readings of Proust.[2] He would devote most of his five decades long career to the study of Ruskin.
Burd enrolled in the Master’s Program at Stanford University in 1941. Not long after that, he enlisted in the Navy and was assigned to Intelligence duties in Charleston, South Carolina. During World War II, he was also part of the Battle of Okinawa. Burd retired from the Navy with the rank of Lieutenant Commander after twenty years of service in the U. S. Navy Reserves.
He was a member of the Department of English at the SUNY Cortland from 1951 until retirement in 1979. In 1982, a Festschrift was published to memorialize him.[3] Likewise, the annual Van Burd Memorial Lecture in Literary Criticism was established at SUNY Cortland in his honor.
Burd married Julia Ella Robinson in 1953. The couple had a daughter Joyce.
Works
- The Winnington Letters of John Ruskin (1969)
- The Ruskin Family Letters, 1801-43 (1973; 2 volumes)
- John Ruskin and Rose La Touche (1978)
- Ruskin, Lady Mount-Temple, and the Spiritualists: An Episode in Broadlands History (1982)
- A Tour to the Lakes in Cumberland: John Ruskin’s Diary for 1830 (1990; co-edited and written with James S. Dearden)
- Christmas Story: John Ruskin’s Venetian Letters of 1876-1877 (1990)
Notes
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- ↑ Spates 2012, 17.
- ↑ Rhodes, Robert; Del Ivan Janik, eds. (1982). Studies in Ruskin: Essays in Honor of Van Akin Burd. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press.
References
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