William Scheuerle, in Memoriam

William Scheuerle

William Howard Scheuerle died February 15, 2014, in Tampa, Florida, after a long struggle with bone marrow disease. He was eighty-three. Bill was born in 1930 in Irwin, Pennsylvania. He earned his BA from Muskingum College in 1952 and his MA from the University of Pennsylvania in 1954. After a two-year hitch in the army and a short stretch of teaching at Westminster College, he earned a PhD in English from Syracuse University in 1964. He met his wife Jane while he was studying at Syracuse and she was teaching at Cazenovia College; they married in 1958. Except for those two years at Westminster, 1956–58, he spent his entire professional life at the University of South Florida, starting as an assistant professor in 1964 and rising to professor, then professor emeritus. He also filled the roles of university marshal, undergraduate dean, associate academic vice president, acting academic vice president, and acting director of graduate studies at various times. In addition, he took leave to serve as coordinator of humanities and fine arts for the Florida university system, interim academic vice president at Hillsborough Community College, and just before retirement, instructor in the Florida State University London Program.

He failed in his first attempt at retirement in 2003, coming back to the University of South Florida to be the founding director of the Humanities Institute, College of Arts and Sciences, for six years. In 2009 he retired from gainful employment and served on a variety of boards and published some of his voluminous research. Bill is survived by his wife Jane; their daughter Angela and her husband Alan; and their son Ramsey, his wife Dawn, and their children, Jen-Marie, Paul, Serena, Lily Anne, and Ethan. He also leaves behind the “William H. Scheuerle Distinguished Humanities Award” at the University of South Florida, the “William H. Scheuerle Graduate Student Paper Prize” at the Victorian Interdisciplinary Studies Association of the Western United States, and a projected William H. Scheuerle Award, which will assist retired and independent scholars in attending the RSVP annual meeting.

From his earliest days as an English professor, Bill spent his professional life as a committed, enthusiastic Victorianist. His dissertation work on Henry Kingsley gave him an introduction to the potential of periodicals as research tools for better understanding the Victorian period. He was one of the founders of RSVP, contributed to several of its early projects, and served as the organization’s third president, 1975–77, following Michael Wolff and Josef Altholz. He began serving on the RSVP advisory board and senior advisory board in 1977. Somehow he found the time to edit Victorian Periodicals Review from 1996 to 2003. One of his RSVP projects involved collecting references to individuals associated with Victorian periodicals in the Dictionary of National Biography and Modern English Biography. Visitors to his home in Lutz will remember the stacks of cases of index cards on which he had carefully recorded his data in longhand in those years before computers would revolutionize how we do our work. Bill also contributed to important RSVP projects: the Wellesley Index, Waterloo Directory, Union List of Victorian Serials in North America, and Victorian Periodicals: A Guide to Research.

In 1974 he sponsored a conference titled “Victorian Outsiders” at the University of South Florida, inviting Victorianists in the Southeast to contribute to and learn about the growing discipline of interdisciplinary Victorian studies. Five years later, the Southeastern Nineteenth-Century Studies Association (now simply the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association) was born, and the founders credited Bill’s conference and his ongoing support with getting it under way. He served as president and board member of SENCSA. In 2004, he received the NCSA Presidential Award for his “sustained service to the Association and significant contributions to nineteenth-century studies.”

In 1979, I first met Bill at the St. Louis meeting of RSVP, where I’d gone to find support for the Union List of Victorian Serials project. After I’d given my pitch to the membership, he came to me and introduced himself. I knew of...