Like so many others over this last week, I am mourning the loss of a beloved teacher and mentor: American intellectual historian Dorothy Ross. Together with Ronald G. Walters, Dorothy was one of my doctoral co-advisors at Johns Hopkins University and had a profound impact on my life and career.
Dorothy challenged her students. In the first week of my first semester of her seminar, we were assigned to read all of Perry Miller’s New England Mind, a book of some 500 pages, and summarize it in a précis of four pages or less. The next assignment was to do the same with The Machiavellian Moment by John Pocock!
Yet within and behind such challenges was a deeper message. From Day One, Dorothy treated her students as colleagues and respected peers, a status we certainly had not earned but that she believed, against the evidence, that we could grow into. There was, as Miller might have put it, a covenant established between teacher and student, one defined always by Dorothy’s incomparable intellect and grace.
I last saw her in person a few years ago when this picture was taken at a breakfast we shared in Washington, D.C. I will miss her warmth and wise counsel very much.
