In Memoriam

Diana Poteat Stallings Hobby, associate editor emerita, dear friend, and uniquely generous benefactor, passed away 4 July 2014. In many ways, no one has been more involved in the success and continued good health of SEL than Diana. In 1979, while working on her Ph.D. in English at Rice (awarded 1981), she became the associate editor at SEL, and served until her retirement in 1991. In recent years, she again assisted us with her extraordinary proofreading for each issue, a skill that remarkably seemed virtually untouched by her battle with Alzheimer’s. In her honor and with her support, the Hobby Family Foundation has made many important gifts to the journal over the years. Endowments have been set up with these funds to support our Monroe Spears Award given annually for the “best essay” in each volume of SEL, and most significantly, to establish the Diana Hobby Editorial Fellows program, which provides generous stipends to Rice English department graduate students while they learn about scholarly rigor, professional behavior, and publishing standards and protocols. Bob Patten recalls that “she was always there for those in need, and never put herself first. Her energy and knowledge were phenomenal, but always in the service of others.” Her passion for the arts and humanities was especially intense, and we are grateful that she chose to include SEL in that passion.