December 2020
December 2020 www.society4romanianstudies.org Vol 42 Fall 2020 No. 3 (Special Edition) coedited by Leah Valtin-Erwin and Maria Bucur Obituary…………………………………………..…………………………….2 Eulogy………………………………………………..………………………….3 Biographical and Professional Information…………..…….…….5 In Memoriam……………………………………………………...………..10 Bibliography…………………………………………………………….…...24 1 Obituary Keith Hitchins (Thursday, April 2nd, 1931 - Sunday, November 1st, 2020) passed away, aged 89, at the Carle Foundation Hospital on November 1, 2020 from natural causes. He was an historian, stamp and coin aficionado, treasurer of archives, specialized book collector, avid correspondent, and a language passionate whose work drew on an encyclopedic knowledge of the Eastern world, from Central and Eastern Europe to Central Asia and Southeast Asia, but who remained at heart a Romanian historian. He was a professor of Eastern European History at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1967 until 2019 when he retired. Hitchins was born in Schenectady, NY to Henry, a business ads writer, and Lillian Turrian, a homemaker related to the Vanderbilt family. His maternal great-parents descended from German- and French- speaking areas in Switzerland, while his father was of English ancestry. Living at the peak of a great passion for politics among the Americans, Keith grew up in a union family, recollecting gatherings on holidays when he was mindful not to offend the sensibilities of his grandmother, a Republican state committeewoman, and those of his grandfather, an organizer of a steel union. He was sent to a grade school that taught kindergarten to twelfth grade in a building with only two rooms in rural New York, at a time when the centralization of schools was underway, and parents didn't value education.
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