User:Kelburn

Robert C. Schweik was a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor and a very active literary scholar, with an international reputation on the work of Thomas Hardy. He was born August 5, 1927 in Chicago, Illinois, the son of the late Charles Schweik and Eleanor (Waters) Schweik. He went through elementary, and high school in Chicago, IL. At the age of 17 near the end of WWII, he enlisted in the U.S. Navy Air Force. After the war, assisted by the GI bill, he entered college, receiving a B.A. degree in English Literature from Loyola University, and then earned the Ph.D. in literature at Notre Dame University. He taught as a professor of English for 15 years at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, before joining the faculty of the State University College at Fredonia. Over the years he taught Freshman Composition, History of the Language, Bibliography, and his areas of specialization, Victorian and Early Modern Literature. He also pioneered the innovative “Composition by Computer” class, including writing and making available to his students the comprehensive manual that helped make the class successful. After being invited to give a lecture at the first Thomas Hardy conference in Dorchester, England, in 1968, he published widely on Hardy’s novels and poetry, in addition to other scholarship on John Stuart Mill, Robert Browning, and in later years on the interrelationship of literature, art and music. He edited Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights for Cambridge Books and Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd for W.W. Norton & Co. He also co-authored Hart Crane: A Descriptive Bibliography and a guide to research widely used for many years, Reference Sources in English and American Literature. During his 40-year career he augmented his teaching, scholarship, and publication endeavors with extensive committee work, devoting special time and care to supporting union (United University Professors) causes and library enhancement. At both Marquette and Fredonia he served on the library committees that developed plans for important library additions and offering enhancement. He also wrote and published poetry and popular fiction, including a series of stories published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine that featured a bookish detective with a certain resemblance to the author. One of those stories was listed in the “Honor Roll” of Best Detective Stories of the Year in 1977. In the 1970s he was named a Distinguished Teaching Professor, retiring from that rank in 1990 to emeritus professor status. In his retirement he became increasingly active as vice-president of both the Thomas Hardy Society (in England) and the Thomas Hardy Association (in the U.S.). Up to the time of his death he served as Director of sections of the Thomas Hardy Association website. As one group of students put it in a plaque they gave to him inscribed with words by Thomas Carlyle, he was “a sincere and true professor, who grappled ‘face to face, heart to heart, with the naked truth of things.’” He is survived by his beloved wife of fifty-two years, Joanne (Lovell) Schweik. He was the inspiring and deeply loved and nurturing father of Susan and Charles, a loving father-in-law to Chris Taaffe and Brenda Bushouse, and the enthusiastic, playful, adored grandfather of Emma, Maxwell and Sophia. He is also survived by a younger brother who he cared about deeply, Richard (and wife Joem), of Cottontown, TN. He was predeceased by his parents, a brother Donald, and son-in-law Rodney McElroy.