Deborah Jane Knuth Klenck, longtime professor of English at Colgate University in New York, passed away on April 10 at the age of 72.
In 1978, Dr. Klenck joined the faculty in the department of English at Colgate University, where she taught for 42 years before retiring in 2020. She taught a wide-range of English courses on Shakespeare, Milton, the Restoration, eighteenth-century literature, and British Fiction, as well as seminars on Jane Austen, Samuel Johnson, and Charles Dickens. She was well-known for the study groups that she led in London and for chairing the Committee on Off-Campus Study. During her tenure, she founded and directed “Miltonathon,” a now-annual campus tradition of reading Paradise Lost aloud from beginning to end.
Outside of academia, Dr. Klenck was a trained singer, touring throughout Europe as a soprano with the Smith Chamber Chorus. She also performed throughout the state of New York and spent two decades with the soprano section at St. Thomas’ Episcopal Church.
Dr. Klenck completed her undergraduate degree at Smith College, a women’s liberal arts school in Northampton, Massachusetts. She earned her Ph.D. from Yale University.