Joanne S. Frye, longtime professor at the College of Wooster in Ohio, passed away on July 22. She was 79 years old.
Dr. Frye’s academic career was dedicated to literature, social justice, and women’s studies. At the College of Wooster, she founded the women’s studies program, which she chaired for several years. She taught various English courses, focusing on authors such as Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, and the Bronte sisters. She also founded an interdisciplinary course on feminist perspectives in motherhood.
Throughout her lifetime, Dr. Frye authored four books. Drawing on her significant literature research and teaching experience, she wrote Living Stories, Telling Lives: Women and the Novel in Contemporary Experience (University of Michigan Press, 1986), Tillie Olsen: A Study of the Short Fiction (Twayne Publishers, 1995), and Biting the Moon: A Memoir of Feminism and Motherhood (Syracuse University Press, 2012). She also wrote a personal collection, A Mosaic of Memories (2023).
Dr. Frye held a bachelor’s degree in English from Bluffton College in Ohio and a Ph.D. in English from Indiana University.