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Home > March/April 2009 > In Memoriam: Hieatt

March/April 2009

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In Memoriam

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March/April 2009

A. Kent Hieatt ’54 GSAS, who taught in Columbia’s English department from 1944–69, died on January 8, 2009. He lived in Essex, Conn.

Hieatt was born in Indianapolis, lived briefly in Samsun, Turkey, with his parents, and grew up in Louisville, Ky. After earning a B.A. from the University of Louisville in 1943, Hieatt earned his Ph.D. in English and comparative literature from GSAS and was offered a position as assistant professor of English the same year. He later became associate professor. While at Columbia, Hieatt published Short time’s endless monument: The symbolism of the numbers in Edmund Spenser’s Epithalamion.

In 1969, Hieatt was offered a full professorship at the University of Western Ontario; he worked there until his 1989 retirement. Hieatt also was chairman of the north-central division of the Renaissance Society of America, 1973–74; chairman of the English Literature, Renaissance Division of the Modern Language Association, 1978–79; recipient of the 1984 William Riley Parker Prize; and president of the Spenser Society.

He was senior founding editor of Spenser Newsletter and co-editor of Spenser Encyclopaedia. Hieatt authored Chaucer, Spenser, Milton: Mythopoeic Continuities and Transformations and was co-translator of Lorenzo Valla’s On Pleasure, De Voluptate. With his wife, Constance, he published a 1961 children’s version of The Canterbury Tales.

Hieatt is survived by his wife; daughters, Alice Coulombe and Kathy; brother, Charles; and two grandchildren. Memorial contributions may be made to the Essex Meadows Foundation.

 Gordon Chenoweth Sauer III ’11 Arts 

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