Content area
Full Text
Ross Chambers was bom in Kempsey New South Wales in November 1932 and died in Ann Arbor Michigan in October 2017, just short of his 85th birthday. His final illness was brief and he died surrounded by caring friends. Detailed obituaries setting out his many achievements can be found at https://protect-au.mimecast. com/s/ZXg4BxUoqDVmiZ?domain=record.umich.edu (Paulson) and in The French Australian Review, Number 63 Australian Summer 2017-2018 (Sankey). Others can be expected elsewhere, with a memorial issue to be published by Romanic Review.
Ross went to school in Kempsey, then later studied at the University of Sydney, after which he travelled to France. I believe he sold his spinet to fund his passage. The story of his formal studies does not do justice to the rich influence of his mother: his love of languages, of literature and of music are just part of her heritage. He did his doctorate in Grenoble under the guidance of Léon Cellier, a Nerval scholar of renown. It was completed in 1967 and came out as his first book, Gérard de Nerval et la poétique du voyage (1969). Part of the same promotion as Judith Robinson, he joined her department at the University of New South Wales in 1964 following a brief stint at the University of Queensland, and in 1972 he was appointed to the McCaughey Chair of French at the University of Sydney. In 1975, he moved to the USA, where he was appointed Professor French at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. In 1985, sharing his appointment with the Department of French, he became the founding Professor of Comparative Literature in that institution; this move reflected his evolving sense of the "place" of the study of French in the study of literature, a sense that later came to encompass Cultural Studies. His contributions to all three fields are extremely rich. Ross retired in 2002 but remained in Ann Arbor. He took out citizenship of the USA very shortly before it became possible to retain dual citizenship with Australia, but he did not re-apply for the latter, always considering himself an expatriate in both countries. He has left a book-length manuscript autobiography in which, I have no doubt, he will tell the story of his abiding sense of outsiderhood. Yet it...