Eliza Miruna Ghil (1943–2017)

Troubadour scholar Eliza Miruna Ghil died in New Orleans on February 3, 2017. Despite not feeling well, she insisted—with typical courage and dedication—on attending a departmental meeting and teaching her Italian seminar on what was to be her last day at the University of New Orleans (UNO), where she had taught since 1984. Known to her Romanian friends and family as Miruna and to American and French colleagues as Eliza, she leaves a major legacy to troubadour scholarship in her teaching and publications.

Born in Bucharest on November 26, 1943, Eliza completed with honors her studies in Romanian language and literature at the country's foremost university. She always remained in touch with her professors and in later years continued to publish in her first language. On a government-authorized trip to Vienna in 1966, Eliza did not return to Communist Romania where she had known terrible privations (as punishment for her defection, her family would suffer after her departure). Instead she went to Israel to marry Michael Ghil, who had left for Israel with his family four years earlier. Fluent in Hebrew after a stay in ulpan on a kibbutz, she earned an advanced degree in French and English "with distinction" under Moshe Lazar's guidance. In 1971, she left Israel—together with Michael, who was going on to New York University as a doctoral student in mathematics—for the graduate program in French and Romance Philology at Columbia University. The two were divorced in 1981 but remained fast friends.

While Eliza's home department at Columbia was French, she worked closely with Program in Comparative Literature faculty as well. Her dissertation advisor was Michael Riffaterre, but she studied as well with comparatist medievalists W.T.H. Jackson and Joan Ferrante. Among her Columbia contemporaries were future Occitanist colleagues Laura Kendrick, Roy Rosenstein, Sarah Spence, and George Wolf.

Eliza taught French at Columbia and completed her PhD there in 1978 with a dissertation on "The Canzo: Structural Study of a Poetic Genre." Subsequently she held appointments at Dartmouth College, where she worked closely with John Rassias on his innovative language-teaching methodology, and then at UNO, where she was promoted to the rank of Professor of French in 1991. She served as chair of the Department of Foreign Languages for a combined total of almost twenty years, from 1988 to 1990 and from 1997 to 2014, and she kept the department together in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Under her determined leadership, the department began to offer MA-level language courses online.

As a Romanist, Eliza's teaching and research spanned the Romance languages—especially French, Italian and, of course, Occitan. But her greatest passion since her years in Israel was always the troubadours. She was part of a nucleus of Occitanists in New Orleans, where she was joined by troubadour colleagues George Wolf at UNO (cf. Rupert Pickens and Wendy Pfeffer, Tenso 17 [2002]: 71–72), and Beth Poe at Tulane.

Eliza's many Occitanist publications are listed below. Most important among these were her L'Âge de parage and the chapter on "Imagery and Vocabulary" for A Handbook of the Troubadours. Among other titles not individually highlighted here, she co-edited with UNO colleagues Elaine S. Brooks and the late George Wolf Romance Studies Today: In Honor of Beatriz Varela, a third Romanist in the same department.

Eliza's work in other languages was no less creative. In keeping with the oral emphasis of the Rassias credo, she reported in an MLA presentation on formulaic narratives she had recorded among her relatives in Transylvania.

A book-length manuscript entitled Love's Law remains half-finished at Eliza's death. A publisher has been contacted, and it is hoped that colleagues may step forward to complete her long-term project. A first posthumous publication appeared in March 2017, just a month after her untimely death.

Patricia Harris Gillies adds, "Eliza had a profound hatred of every kind of oppression and injustice which was part of her deeply passionate and ethical nature." Eliza is remembered on her campus and around the world as a professor who, for...