Jamie Saxon, Office of Communications
Jan. 15, 2021 9:32 a.m.
Lionel Gossman, the M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, Emeritus, died at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania-Penn Medicine in Philadelphia on Jan. 11. He was 91.
Lionel Gossman, 2013
Photo by William Paulson, 1981 graduate alumnus
Gossman joined Princeton’s faculty in 1976 and transferred to emeritus status in 1999. His research and teaching focused on French literature of the 17th and 18th centuries; literature, literary criticism and history as social and cultural institutions; and the writing of history. He served as director of graduate studies from 1977-83 of what was then called the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures and was department chair from 1991-96.
In the 19th century, nationalism and democracy were on the rise in Europe, transforming old nation-states and leading to the creation of powerful new ones. Basel, with its legendary wealth, its 400-year-old university, and its tradition of humanist learning, clung to its ancient status as an independent city-republic within the loose Swiss Confederation. It owed its prosperity to its situation at the crossroads of France, the German states and the states of Southern Europe and to a vast network of international and intercontinental trading connections developed by its enterprising elite families. Its citizens looked out at the changes taking place around them and feared for their privileges, their prosperity and the political autonomy of their miniature state. By mid-century, Basel had become a focus of resistance to the optimistic and confident modernism of the time. Lionel Gossman s sweeping work tells the story of Basel, this seemingly anachronistic hybrid of commercialism and cla