Necrology

John Charles Ulreich, Jr. '63

Sep. 16, 1941-Mar. 31, 2022

John Charles Ulreich, Jr. ’63, P’06 died on March 31, 2022, in Tucson, Ariz. Born on Sept. 16, 1941, in Brooklyn, N.Y., he grew up in White Plains, N.Y., and came to Hamilton from White Plains High School. On the Hill, he was a member of the Delta Phi fraternity and majored in English, the subject that would define his subsequent academic career. In his senior year, he was a member of the Student Senate and was on the staff of The Continental. That same year, he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. 

During the summers, John worked at Camp Laurel in the Shawangunk Mountains, near Poughkeepsie and New Paltz, N.Y. His family had regularly summered in that area. It was in the summer of 1961 that he met Judith Babb at camp. They formed a relationship that led to their marriage on June 18, 1966. They had two sons.

Awarded a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, John began graduate work in English at Harvard University in fall 1963, completing his master’s degree the following year and his Ph.D. in 1969. During the first two years of his doctoral studies, he was also a teaching fellow. The title of his doctoral dissertation was By Gradual Scale Sublimed: Ideas of Form in Milton’s Poetry. John Milton became the focus of both John’s scholarship and his teaching. 

John’s academic career began while he was finishing his doctorate when he was appointed as an instructor in English at Hamilton in 1967. After receiving his degree, he was promoted to the rank of assistant professor. In 1971, he left the Hill for the University of Arizona in Tucson where the balance of his career unfolded. He was promoted to associate professor in 1974, to full professor in 1984, and retired in 2016.

He drew inspiration as a teacher from his mentors at Hamilton including Austin Briggs, George Nesbitt, Dwight Lindley, and John Crossett. As John recalled in his 40th reunion yearbook, Russell Blackwood of the Philosophy Department remarked on one occasion that the College’s instructors “are all teaching philosophy. Some of us do it better than others.”

John’s fascination with John Milton, first manifest in graduate school, led to his becoming a member of the Milton Society. He was also active in the Modern Language Association, the Renaissance Society of America, and the Spenser Society, this latter organization devoted to the reading and study of the works of Edmund Spenser. In 1983, he published a critical edition of the 20th-century philosopher Owen Barfield’s poetic drama Orpheus.

But John’s devotion to Milton was not limited to his scholarship. In 1998, he instituted the Milton Marathon at the University of Arizona: a 12-hour event in which participants read what is perhaps the poet’s best known work: Paradise Lost. The first year, the readers were 35 students from the class where he came up with the idea. Over time, nearly 200 participated.

John also taught a course titled The Bible as Literature, this in his position as an affiliate faculty member of Arizona’s Department of Religion, though, as he made clear in his 50th reunion yearbook, he did not teach religion. Not surprisingly, he also taught a survey course titled Earlier English Literature: from Beowulf to Milton.

For John, teaching was an essential part of his academic career. Reflecting on his professional history in his 40th reunion yearbook, he wrote: “I have learned to love teaching, and that learning began at Hamilton with my teachers there.” A student of his Bible as Literature course wrote in his evaluation of John: “Professor Ulreich’s course was the most stimulating and intellectually rigorous course I took at the [University of Arizona]. If you are serious about pushing your intellectual boundaries, his classes are a must.”

In addition to being an avid reader, an activity that John believed had “little to do with self-improvement but a great deal to do with self-discovery,” he and his wife were hikers, campers, and “birders.” His interest in bird life began in summer camp when he was a child. Judith and he made two 10,000-mile birding trips that not only covered much of the United States, but also parts of Canada and Mexico in search of new (to them) species. At home, he could regularly be found on the back porch, binoculars in hand. 

John declared himself to be “strongly attached to Hamilton’s core values — academic integrity, intellectual community, and self-knowledge.” As one for whom “teaching and learning have always been the center of my life,” John credited the faculty, those mentioned above and others, with encouraging him to do what he loved. As he put it in his 50th reunion yearbook: “I have, and I am.”

John C. Ulreich is survived by his wife and his two sons, including Alexander J. Ulreich ’06.

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