Roger Lee Emerson
Roger passed away peacefully at the age of 90 on Friday, 28 February 2025 at Manor Village Retirement Home in London, Ontario.
Roger Lee Emerson was born to Arthur and Doris Emerson in Barton, Vermont, on 26 March 1934. He attended the Barton graded school and the seventh and eighth grades at the High School in Hanover, New Hampshire. He graduated from the Clark School for Boys in Hanover in 1952 and entered Dartmouth that fall. Emerson received his B.A. “with high distinction in philosophy” in 1956. He went on to Brown University (M.A., Philosophy, 1958) and Brandeis University (M.A., History of Ideas, 1958) and there took a Ph.D. in the History of Ideas in 1962. He taught social science and humanities for a year at the University of Minnesota (Minneapolis) and for two years taught in the Humanities Programme at MIT before going to the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario. There, he remained in the History Department for the rest of his teaching career becoming Professor in 1983 and also an Honorary Professor in the History of Science (1989-91). For 32 years, Roger kept alive an interdisciplinary seminar on the eighteenth century at Western.
He was the author of more than 60 articles, on many aspects of the European and Scottish Enlightenments, and of seven books: two dealt with Scottish universities c.1690-c.1805; another two were volumes of essays on eighteenth-century Scotland and its Enlightenment. The fifth was a biography of the 3rd Duke of Argyll, one of the great politicians of eighteenth-century Britain. That book received the Saltire Society’s award for the “Best Book of the Year in Scottish History” for 2013. His last books dealt with Vermonters, c.1800-1940. He was also an Associate Editor of the Oxford Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment and of the first two volumes (1980-81) of the annual published by the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, a publication he initiated. He was active in that group from its founding in 1979 until c. 2005 and was its President, 1978-80. For many years, he was also active in the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. He sat on the editorial board of Hume Studies from 1984 to 1994 and was a long-time member of the Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies Society, becoming its second President in 1984. In 2000, CSECS and ECSSS held a joint reception in his honor at the Robarts Library, The University of Toronto, where he was the recipient of a festschrift edited by Paul B. Wood, The Scottish Enlightenment: Essays in Reinterpretation. The ECSSS also presented Roger with a “lifetime achievement award” in 2008. His scholarly legacy was many-faceted. He was a good teacher for hard-working students and was diligent in promoting enlightenment studies in Canada. In Scottish history, he made contributions to the history of science and medicine, to its political history c. 1720-60, and redefined the Scottish Enlightenment, basing it on notions of general improvement and including the religious. Not everyone agreed with him, but he was well respected as a scholar who knew the Scottish archives as well as most living in Scotland.
He married Jean Dalgleish of Rutherglen, Scotland, in 1976. They had no children, separated in 1994, and were divorced in 2013. Roger was still working until late in life—principally on an autobiography, on essays and books dealing with Vermonters, and on a volume of poems. He became a Canadian citizen but remained a Vermonter at heart. His and his family’s papers are now in the archive at Western University in London.
[In the fall of 2022, Roger was hospitalized with Covid-19. His Parkinson’s disease had also progressed, necessitating a move to The Manor Village Retirement Home in 2023. Roger’s POAs, Jerry Mulcahy and Mark Spencer, would like to thank The Manor’s expert staff for providing him with such dedicated care during his final years. Roger will be deeply missed by his cohort of local friends, by scholars of the eighteenth century from around the world, and especially by many once-young students for whom he always had time, sound advice, and affection. Cremation has taken place. There will be no funeral service, as was Roger’s wish.]