UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. – The Penn State Liberal Arts community is saddened by the loss of Wilson Moses, Ferree Professor of American History Emeritus, who passed away June 13 in State College at age 82.
Moses was a faculty member in the Department of History from 1992 to 2014, following previous appointments at Boston University, Brown University, Southern Methodist University and the University of Iowa.
He is survived by his wife of 60-plus years, Maureen (Connor) Moses. The couple had two sons, William and Jeremiah, four granddaughters and one great-granddaughter. He was preceded in death by his parents, William Jeremiah Moses and Ida Mae (Johnson) Moses, and his sister, Miriam Moses, and is survived by his sister, Roselyn Higgins, and several nieces and nephews.
“Professor Moses was an accomplished historian of wide-ranging interests, though his work on Black political thought and culture was particularly influential on several waves of African American history and Black studies scholars,” said Clarence Lang, Susan Welch Dean of the College of the Liberal Arts. “It is a testament to his impact on the discipline that he remained an active scholar well after his retirement, most recently publishing a major work on Thomas Jefferson. He will be missed as one of the leading lights of the profession.”
“Wilson was a pioneering figure in the field of African American intellectual history, a warm and generous colleague with a wry sense of humor, and an inspiring teacher known for his remarkable erudition and wide-ranging interests,” added Amy S. Greenberg, head of the Department of History and George Winfree Professor of History and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.
During his time at Penn State, Moses taught such courses as History of the Early American Republic, American Cultural History, American Industrialism & Social Darwinism, American Business History, and Economic Thought from the Puritans to Ayn Rand, as well as numerous courses in Africana studies.
A prolific scholar and writer, Moses published numerous books, including “The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850-1925” (Oxford University Press, 1978), “Alexander Crummell: A Study in Civilization and Discontent” (Oxford University Press, 1989), “The Wings of Ethiopia: Studies in African American Life and Letters (Iowa State University Press, 1990), “Afrotopia: Roots of African-American Popular History” (Cambridge University Press, 1998), “Creative Conflict in African American Thought” (Cambridge University Press, 2004), and “Thomas Jefferson, A Modern Prometheus” (Cambridge University Press, 2019).
In addition, Moses published frequently on African American scholar and civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois. He also delivered several prominent lectures on Thomas Jefferson, including the Nathan Huggins Lectures at Harvard University on “Thomas Jefferson and the Notion of Liberty” in 2013; “Thomas Jefferson: Private Heresy and Civic Religion” at the University of Pennsylvania in 2014; “Thomas Jefferson’s Notions of Liberty” at the University of Virginia in 2014; and “Thomas Jefferson” at Oxford University in 2015.
Born in Detroit, Moses received both his bachelor’s degree in American literature and master’s degree in British literature from Wayne State University, and his doctorate in American civilization from Brown University in 1975.
While a Ford Foundation postdoctoral fellow, Moses was a guest of the University of Cambridge from 1978 to 1980. During that time, he lectured in Europe and Africa for the U.S. State Department.
He also took French courses at the Catholic University of Paris and at the Sorbonne, and studied several modern French and German restorations of “Tristan et Yseut” and 19th-century conceptions of the Middle Ages by writers and composers including Anatole France, Alfred Lloyd Tennyson, Henry Adams, Matthew Arnold and Richard Wagner.
Moses was a classical music and opera enthusiast who enjoyed playing the violin. He particularly loved Bach’s Partitas and Sonatas for the Violin, Mozart’s operas and Wagner’s “Der Ring des Nibelungen,” and published encyclopedia articles on racism in Mozart’s Zauberflöte” and antisemitism in Wagner’s operas.
He received Penn State’s Faculty Scholars Medal for Distinction in the Arts and Humanities and was a member of the Society of American Historians. He also received Fulbright visiting professorships at the University of Vienna in 1987-88 and Free University of Berlin in 1983-84, a visiting professorship at Wilhelm Pieck University in East Germany in 1983, a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship in 1988, a National Research Council/Ford Foundation grant in 1983-84, and a Southern Fellowships Fund/Andrew W. Mellon Foundation postdoctoral grant in 1978-79.
A memorial service for Moses will be held on Saturday, July 20, at 2 p.m. at Koch Funeral Home, 2401 S. Atherton Street, State College. Online condolences may be entered at the funeral home’s website.