Emily Mitchell Wallace Harvey, former assistant professor of English at Penn, died September 29 from cancer. She was 85.

Dr. Wallace was born in Springfield, Missouri. She earned a bachelor’s degree from what is now Missouri State University in 1958. She completed a master’s degree in 1959 and a doctorate in 1965, both from Bryn Mawr College.

Dr. Wallace began her professional career teaching history and English literature at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia and then went on to teach literature at the Shipley School in Bryn Mawr. 

In 1961, she was hired as an instructor in the English department at Penn. She was promoted to assistant professor in 1966. 

Dr. Wallace served as a visiting assistant professor of English at Swarthmore and then returned to the Curtis Institute of Music as the chair of their English department, 1976-1983, taking a brief interlude to serve as a leader in the interdisciplinary seminar at Yale University.

Since 2001, Dr. Wallace had been a research associate in the Center for Visual Culture at Bryn Mawr College. She was a research scholar in poetry and the visual arts at the Cooper Union in New York.

Dr. Wallace served as a guest editor for Paideuma, a journal of modern and contemporary poetry and poetics, for which she edited a centennial issue on William Carlos Williams in 1983. She was a member of the Modern Language Association; Association of Literary Scholars, Critics and Writers; Ezra Pound Society; and the William Carlos Williams Society.

Dr. Wallace is survived by a brother, sister, six nephews and two nieces.

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