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  • Editor’s Note
  • Reid Barbour

I am very sad to announce the death of Jerry Leath Mills, who served faithfully and skillfully as the editor of Studies in Philology from 1980 to 1996. Professor Mills was a distinguished Renaissance scholar with special interests in Edmund Spenser and Sir Walter Ralegh, and a gifted, decorated teacher of graduates and undergraduates alike. He also collaborated with his mentor O. B. Hardison, Jr. (himself an editor of Studies in Philology) on The Forms of Imagination: An Anthology of Poetry, Fiction, and Drama (1972).

Born in Burlington, North Carolina, in 1938, Professor Mills took his undergraduate degree at the University of North Carolina and his advanced degrees at Harvard, then promptly returned to UNC where he taught in the English Department from the late 1960s until his retirement in 1996. This is not the place to let readers know just how brilliant, entertaining, and authentic a human being he was. Nor do I have the expertise (or the wit) to characterize Professor Mills’s widely acclaimed studies of dead mules in Southern literature.

But this is the place to express gratitude for the care that Professor Mills put into this old journal within a rapidly changing academic world, keeping it alive and well, resolute in its historical focus but also adaptable in what that might mean. Serving in turn as assistant editor, associate editor, and editor over the course of more than thirty years, Professor Mills ensured that Studies in Philology would reach its century mark in 2006 with an undiminished vitality and clarity of vision. Although after retirement he lived well east of Chapel Hill in Washington, North Carolina, Professor Mills was a regular attendee at editorial meetings and an invaluable source of wisdom and memory for the editorial board and this editor. We are heartsick to lose him; we are dedicated to doing him proud.

July 26, 2012 [End Page i]

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