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Memorial for Professor Timothy McGovern
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Event Announcement
(1965-2006) Professor Timothy M. McGovern Timothy M. McGovern, professor of Spanish and Portuguese, director of the Spanish and Portuguese Language Programs and a leading academic authority on the Spanish writer Benito Pérez Galdós, passed away as a result of acute bronchial pneumonia on October 9, 2006 at the age of 41. Professor McGovern was a dedicated scholar who always took time to mentor and help others. The entire university community laments this sudden loss and will come together to remember and celebrate his life. Professor Timothy M. McGovern at UCSB Timothy M. McGovern died suddenly on October 9, 2006 at the young age of 41. Tim came to the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at UC Santa Barbara in 1998, a year after receiving his PhD at UCLA. We initially appointed Tim as Lecturer to run our lower division language program and to supervise the graduate instructors, a responsibility he carried out with complete dedication and enormous success to the moment of his death. Eventually Tim’s position was changed to tenure-track, and in 2005 he became an Associate Professor and was on his way to becoming a Full Professor. Tim published two books on the Spanish 19th-century novelist Galdós, co-authored another book on contemporary Portuguese language usage, and co-edited a conference proceedings volume on minority languages and cultures of contemporary Spain. He also authored a large number of articles, including studies on contemporary Galician, Catalan and Portuguese writers, Mexican literature and cinema, Queer Studies, as well as co-authoring a paper with a social psychologist on attitudes toward the culturally different. Beyond his research, Tim touched so many lives at UCSB and elsewhere. Following the news of his death, our department was inundated with phone calls and e-mails expressing shock and personal loss over Tim’s passing. Among Tim’s many fine attributes was his willingness to serve as mentor and advisor to countless students at all levels as well as to graduate instructors and lecturers teaching our large number of language courses in Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Basque and in Galician Studies. He cared deeply about our language program and in a recent external review of our department, reviewers heaped great praise on the success the program had under Tim’s leadership. Tim supported all students who came into contact with him through his own classes or through our various degree programs. One middle-aged Spanish major said after Tim’s death that without his constant encouragement she would never have made it to her senior year. For graduate students on the job market, every fall Tim held special workshops on how to make application and conduct oneself in job interviews, including what not to do, illustrated with humorous anecdotes based on his own personal experiences. Good humor was indeed one of Tim’s strongest character traits as was his generosity. Unselfish in giving of his time and expertise, Tim would almost never turn down a student request to supervise an independent studies course or honor’s thesis, and he volunteered regularly to teach as an overload freshman seminars on various topics, most recently an Introduction to Queer Studies. He also taught a wide variety of upper division and graduate courses for the department: early modern to contemporary Spanish, Portuguese and Brazilian literature courses as well as seminars in language teaching methodology, literary theory and gender studies. He was on many M.A. committees and chaired three doctoral dissertations. Tim was heavily involved with UCSB’s interdisciplinary program in Latin American and Iberian Studies and contributed much to our interdepartmental Comparative Literature Program. At the UC systemwide level, he was a hard-working member of the UC Consortium for Language Learning and Teaching and was a founding member of UC Mexicanistas, an intercampus research program, and he helped organize the annual UC Mexicanistas colloquium, held at UC Santa Barbara. He was one of the organizers of conferences sponsored by our department on Galician and Catalan studies and contemporary multicultural Spain in general. Tim was also a regular participant in the annual convention of the Modern Language Association of America and the annual Symposium on Portuguese Traditions held at UCLA, and he was an active participant in the Association of Modern Peninsularists of Southern California. All of these many and diverse activities contributed to Tim’s prominence as a UCSB professor. Tim will be terribly missed as professor, colleague and friend. For more photos and words about Tim, and a chance to upload your memories and photos, please visit: http://www.memorypost.com/mcgovern |
