When James Powell learned that a friend was giving his first academic presentation at Syracuse University, Powell made a point to attend – and sat in the front row.

That friend, graduate student Charles Reid, had not told Powell he was coming to SU to speak in front of medievalist professors ready to question his findings. But as Reid walked up and saw Powell, he said it gave him moral support during a nerve-racking experience.

‘He took a very keen interest in making sure I did well,’ said Reid, who made the presentation back in 1993.

Powell, a professor emeritus of medieval history at SU, was laid to rest Saturday after dying of injuries from a car accident in Fayetteville. Family members buried Powell at St. Mary’s Cemetery in DeWitt, N.Y., next to his wife, who was buried on the same day 19 years ago.

Family and friends remember Powell as a talkative man who held a love for medieval history and Italy. He taught at SU for more than three decades until 1997.

At age 5, Powell’s youngest son, John, spent a year in Florence with his father and family. James traveled to Italy many times, returning later with John’s wife and two daughters.

‘He had a really good, remarkable knowledge of the history and all the places we were seeing,’ John said.

James was planning to fly to Florence again this spring until the car accident, after which John said his father spent nearly two weeks in the hospital and underwent surgery before dying Jan. 27. The accident happened on a cold, wintry day, but John said he is still unsure about the cause.

Up until his death, James loved to talk about his work with medieval history and relationships with people across the globe, John said.

‘It was interesting to grow up around a man who knew people all around the world,’ said John, one of James’ six children.

James’ former SU colleague, Ken Pennington, received responses from as far away as England and Germany when he sent out an e-mail announcing James’ death. One e-mail was written in German.

Pennington worked with James in SU’s history department for 27 years and said James loved to sit down and ‘chew the fat’ with students and faculty.

‘Some professors are withdrawn and shy and not very social,’ he said. ‘Well, he was the exact opposite of that.’

James was important for strengthening E.S. Bird Library in medieval and renaissance history, Pennington said. In the 1970s, James led a 10-year project to catalog and ease accessibility to the library’s Leopold von Ranke collection, which houses 25,000 books, pamphlets and other materials from the German historian, said Mary Beth Hinton, assistant to the director of special collections research in Bird.

James also served as chair in 1986 for an international conference on von Ranke in Syracuse, Hinton said.

As James’ SU colleague at the time, Pennington said James was dedicated to his work and the university.

‘He bled orange all the time,’ said Pennington, who is writing James’ obituary for the American Catholic Historical Association, which James had been a member of since 1954.

Robert Trisco, former secretary and treasurer of the historical association, suggested James’ name for the vice presidential position, to which James was elected in 2005. He served as the association’s president one year later.

‘He set an example, I would say, for historians in our country, and he was certainly greatly admired because he was such a good scholar,’ Trisco said.

Trisco met with James and one of his sons in Madrid at the International Congress of Historical Sciences in 1990 and watched James present a paper at the event, which provided a meeting place to discuss historical research. It’s a memory that still stands out today, Trisco said.

Though James left SU in 1997, he still came to the history department’s holiday and beginning-of-the-year parties with his children or grandchildren, said Carol Faulkner, associate professor and chair of the history department in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs.

‘He was always eager to come back to the history department,’ Faulkner said.

For Reid, the former student for whom James sat in the front row to watch speak, the news of James’ death was very saddening, especially because an unexpected car accident caused it, he said.

Reid, now a law professor at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, kept in touch with James after his SU speech through medieval history conferences and dinners. Unlike the stuffiness associated with some medieval history professors, there was nothing stuffy about James’ personality, Reid said.

‘He was someone who was always willing,’ Reid said, ‘just to expend himself for others.’

mcboren@syr.edu

 

Published on February 6, 2011 at 12:00 pm