Sonia Chalif Simon, associate professor of art, emerita at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, passed away on February 4 in Jaca, Spain. She was 96 years old.
Dr. Simon studied at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, during the 1940s. She resumed her education in the mid-1960s earning a bachelor’s of fine arts degree, a master of fine arts degree, and a Ph.D. in art history from Boston University.
An art historian specializing in Medieval, Baroque, and nineteenth-century art, Dr. Simon taught at Colby College from 1982 to 1996. Earlier, she taught at the University of Massachusetts Boston, campuses of the State University of New York, and the College of New Rochelle. From 1975 to 1980, she was director of the Ruth E. Dowd Fine Arts Gallery at SUNY-Cortland.
Dr. Simon’s scholarly work initially focused on one of the most important Carolingian manuscripts, the Drogo Sacramentary (c. 850), written and painted for the personal use of Drogo, bishop of Metz and son of Charlemagne. Later, she shifted her scholarly interests to the Romanesque capitals of the cloister of Jaca Cathedral and their iconography.