University Times

Associate professor of English Eric Otto Clarke died Oct. 10, 2010, in his Shadyside home. He was 46. The death was ruled accidental, according to the Allegheny County Medical Examiner’s Office.

Clarke joined the Pitt faculty in 1992 as an assistant professor. He was promoted to associate professor in 1998. Prior to coming to the University, he taught for a year at the University of New Hampshire.

A native of Washington state, Clarke received a BA in English in 1986 from the University of Puget Sound, graduating cum laude. He earned his MA in 1988 and PhD in 1991 from Brown University.

Colleagues said that Clarke was an innovative scholar in 19th-century British literary studies and sexuality studies. He published articles on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Immanuel Kant, Percy Bysshe Shelley, queer theory and contemporary film.

In 1998, Clarke was a visiting scholar at the program for the study of sexuality, gender, health and human rights at Columbia University. He was awarded a Rockefeller Residency Fellowship at the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, in 1998-99. The book he completed that year, “Virtuous Vice: Homoeroticism and the Public Sphere,” published by Duke University Press, was an interdisciplinary study examining the effects of queer inclusion in public culture.

According to English department chair John Twyning, Clarke’s book has been praised by reviewers in gay and lesbian studies, cultural studies and political science, and it brought together British Romantic culture, U.S. popular culture and philosophy — the Kantian tradition, represented especially by Jürgen Habermas.

Clarke served as an advisory editor and writer for boundary 2, an international journal of literature and culture, 1996-2008. His last essay, “Kant’s Kiss,” soon will be published by the journal.

In recent years, he had been at work on two book-length projects:  “What the Novel Knows,” a study of George Eliot, and “Lifestyles:  Investigations of Gay Modernity.”

Within the English department, Clarke served as director of graduate studies, 2001-06. He developed a popular course for the English department in sexuality studies titled Sexuality and Representation. Other courses he taught included the graduate seminars 19th-Century British Novel, Institutions of Literature and Introduction to Modern Critical Practice, and the undergraduate courses The Victorian Novel, Introduction to Popular Culture, Introduction to Critical Reading and 19th-Century British Literature.

He also taught courses in conjunction with the cultural studies and women’s studies programs. He was a faculty associate at the Center for West European Studies and the Center for Social and Urban Research.

Twyning said, “Eric was active as a commentator on queer culture and politics and a mentor to gay and lesbian students. He was interviewed for a Chicago public radio program on ‘Living Gay’ in 2004, and he was part of a panel discussion here in Pittsburgh in 2007 about ‘Tearoom,’ a documentary film about police surveillance of gay men.”

An Oct. 17 memorial service for Clarke was held at Phipps Conservatory.

Clarke is survived by his mother, Gerri Johnson; brothers Jeff Clarke and William Melnik; nieces Karen Melnik and Jennifer Clarke, and nephews Nicholas Melnik and John Clarke.

—Peter Hart