Obituary: Rupert Wilkinson
John Whitley, Emeritus Reader in American Studies, has written a personal appreciation of Professor Rupert Wilkinson (1936-2014), who died before Christmas.
I have just received an email from Stephen Fender, who like Rupert, was a Professor of American Studies at Sussex until a few years ago. He had lunch with Rupert not long ago and wrote that he was his “usual entertaining self, full of ideas and intellectual curiosity”. How true a description that was.
Indeed, when I think of what a university professor ought to be, I think mostly of Rupert. He even looked just like a university professor: slim, bespectacled and quizzical.
His intellectual curiosity is made abundantly clear in the range and detail of his interests. He wrote books on the American character; the idea of toughness in American culture; a comparison of British and Chinese education; the authoritarian character; funding for higher education; the prevention of drinking problems; and finally a harrowing, enthralling and uplifting account of his childhood internment by the Japanese in the Philippines.
He was an excellent teacher. I had first-hand experience of this since we co-taught two courses.
He seemed avuncular (and was) but the keenness of his intellect would not allow the students to get by with half-formed ideas or inadequate examples. Teaching with him could incorporate examples from television, comic books, musicals and, on one memorable occasion, an argument about Barbie dolls.
His teaching contributed powerfully to the notion that teaching small groups allowed the teacher to work out problems informally and aloud, while he also proved the basic Sussex view that the different subjects studied in a school would have effects on each other.
He was truly a ‘studies’ man, as much a sociologist as a historian, and he built on the work of his mentors, David Riesman and Marcus Cunliffe.
He contributed a great deal to the American year abroad for Sussex students and he had a productive period as head of American Studies.
He will be fondly remembered as a very ‘Sussex’ teacher and scholar.
John Whitley
Emeritus Reader in American Studies