Professor Emeritus Kathleen Koestler died Oct. 6.
She taught for 40 years in UNCG’s Department of Romance Languages, now part of the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures.
Koestler was a productive scholar who published numerous articles and two books, including “The Making of an Artist: Gautier’s Voyage En Espagne.”
She also earned a BSN in Nursing from UNCG and worked for a number of years at Cone Hospital and as a volunteer at HealthServe.
Colleagues remember Koestler’s hospitality: elegant dinner parties and fine French-inspired cooking. She provided many batches of homemade food to friends in need of support.
Mark Smith-Soto, former head of the Department of Romance Languages, offered the following reflection:
“When as a young associate professor of Romance Languages I accepted the headship of that department, I soon learned that Kathleen Koestler was someone I could count on to help my inexperience. The daughter of a general, she was herself a real trooper, ready to take on courses and committee assignments no one else wanted if it helped out the department. A specialist in French literature, she went back to Duke University for her doctorate in Spanish when the increasing enrollments in that language made staffing lower-level courses difficult. Her multilingual abilities made her a natural to take over the editorship of the department’s International Poetry Review, an onerous responsibility she shouldered willingly and with élan, at a point in her career when most faculty were relaxing toward retirement. She was as intelligent, good-humored and generous a colleague as one might hope for, and a friend who will be most sorely missed.”
