A. Reeve Parker, a Cornell University professor emeritus who taught English literature for more than four decades and later worked with incarcerated students, died Sept. 16 in Ithaca. He was 89.
Parker joined Cornell's faculty in 1967 and retired in 2009, according to a Cornell Chronicle remembrance. A scholar of British Romanticism, he became a full professor in 1979 and served multiple terms as department chair beginning in 1978.
His research also explored French Enlightenment and Revolutionary history and literature, theater and the relationships between literary works. His books included “Coleridge's Meditative Art,” published in 1975, and “Romantic Tragedies: The Dark Employments of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley,” published in 2011.
Before coming to Ithaca, Parker graduated from Princeton University in 1958, studied at Oxford University as a Rhodes scholar and earned a doctorate from Harvard University in 1965. He taught at Harvard for two years before joining Cornell.
Colleagues remembered him as a mentor and department leader. Jonathan Culler, a Cornell professor emeritus of English and comparative literature, described Parker as an admired administrator and a supportive colleague whose scholarship helped sustain the department's work on Romanticism.
Parker also taught through Cornell's Prison Education Program at Auburn Correctional Facility, a role the university said remained important to him after retirement. Kenneth McClane, a Cornell professor emeritus who met Parker as a freshman in 1969, recalled Parker helping students in the program read literature closely and develop their writing.
Parker's work outside campus included editing an Ithaca newspaper that brought students and residents together around housing, schools and government programs, McClane said in the university remembrance.
He is survived by his wife, Mary Jacobus; four children, Hannah and Jonathan Parker and Frances and Josiah Jacobus-Parker; and five grandchildren, two of whom are Cornell students, according to the university.
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