Rosalie Littell Colie

Rosalie Littell Colie (1924-1972) was a professor of comparative literature, a specialist in Renaissance English literature, and a poet.

Education She received an A.B. from Vassar College in 1944, a M.A. from Columbia University in 1946, and a Ph.D. in English and History from Columbia in 1950.

Career In 1948-49, she was an instructor at Douglass College, and was appointed as Assistant and Associate Professor at Barnard College and Columbia, 1949-1961. She taught and researched at Wesleyan College 1961-1963, at the University of Iowa from 1963 to 1966, was visiting professor at Yale in 1966-67, and was visiting research professor at Oxford University, 1967–68, In January 1972 she received the first appointment of a woman to the chairmanship of an academic department at Brown University, in the Department of Comparative Literature.

Hannah Arendt was a visiting fellow at Wesleyan College from 1961 when Colie was teaching at Wesleyan. Letters between Colie and Arendt are held in the Hannah Arendt Papers at the Library of Congress Manuscript Division, Washington DC. They have been studied by the feminist scholar, Kathleen B. Jones.

Colie published works on Renaissance paradox, genre theory and Shakespeare. She drowned on 7 July 1972 when her canoe overturned on the Lieutenant River near her home in Old Lyme, Connecticut. 'The Essayist in His Essay', in John W. Yolton, ed., John Locke: Problems and Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 234–261.