Richard Cecil Lounsbury, Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature, passed away in August 2021 in his native Calgary. Richard was a rigorous scholar of The Classical Tradition, an extraordinary reader, generous colleague, and the wittiest friend to many students and scholars who passed through the Classical Studies program at BYU during his long career here. He read with remarkable retention absolutely everything, it seems, from Homer to Thackeray. But his deeply humane learning was hardly confined. His courses on all aspects of classical literature, especially on ancient rhetoric and literary criticism, the picaresque novel, and the reception of classics in early America are legendary. His edition with analytical commentary of Louisa McCord’s collected writings (UVA Press, 1996) is an outright hallmark of scholarship in the intellectual history of antebellum America.
Richard joined the faculty as associate professor in the Department of Humanities, Classics, and Comparative Literature in 1982 and retired as professor in 2013. Though he retained his residence in Provo, he spent most of his retirement in Canada caring for his widowed mother until her death then reading and learning until the end.