With sadness we share the news of the passing of Professor Emeritus James Karl Lyon, founding provost of Eleanor Roosevelt College and 20-year faculty member in the Department of Literature. A beloved family member and advocate for international study, Lyon died July 21, 2022, at his home in Provo, Utah.
During his longstanding service to UC San Diego, Lyon was associate dean of graduate students and chair of the Department of Literature before being selected as the founding provost of the newly established Fifth College, now Eleanor Roosevelt College.
While simultaneously serving as Academic Senate chair, Lyon oversaw the creation of the academic program for the new college that focused on comparative and international culture. A tenet of the college’s mission that remains since its founding in 1988 — to deepen human connections by exploring the evolution of our global world — Lyon had said that all students would benefit from time studying in another country and experiencing other cultures.
This sentiment is reflected in Lyon’s own research, as he was an authority on the life and works of the German playwright Bertolt Brecht. Lyon’s areas of interest included German lyric poetry, prose and drama since 1900, German literature since 1945, and relationships between German, French and United States literature.
In addition to Brecht, Lyon’s interest in writers who have lived and worked in cross-cultural settings also led to a number of publications on the work of Paul Celan, an Eastern European Jew who survived the Holocaust and wrote his works in German while spending most of his adult life in Parisian exile.
Lyon is the author of nine books, including “Bertolt Brecht and Rudyard Kipling: A Marxist’s Imperialist Mentor” (1975), “Bertolt Brecht’s American Cicerone” (1978), “Bertolt Brecht Gedichte: Eine Chronologie” (1986) and “Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger: An Unresolved Conversation, 1951-1970” (2006). His “Bertolt Brecht in America,” first published in 1980, stands today in Brecht scholarship as the standard work on that writer’s exile years and writings in the U.S. Publishing in English and German, Lyon is also the author of 71 research articles and 26 book reviews, and once called his holocaust courses the “most popular and satisfying” of his career, as they led to some of the best work from students.
Recognizing that studying literature brings on questions about who we are, what we think and how we behave, Lyon once said he strove to treat his students with charity and understanding. This, he said, made him a better professor — so much so that he won an “outstanding teacher” award during his time at UC San Diego.
Lyon was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships and two grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, and served as the principal investigator for two substantial grants from the Ford Foundation.
James “Jamie” Lyon was born nine minutes before his twin brother in February 1934 in Rotterdam, Holland. After moving to the U.S. in 1937, Jamie was raised in Salt Lake City. He earned a bachelor’s and then master’s degree from the University of Utah, where he met his wife Dorothy Ann Burton. They were married in 1959. Lyon graduated from Harvard University with a Ph.D. in German languages and literature in 1963, then served as an officer in U.S. Army intelligence for nearly three and a half years. He was adept at working undercover, gathering intelligence from espionage sources behind the iron curtain. After his military service, he accepted an assistant professor position at Harvard University, then an associate professor position at the University of Florida before accepting a full professor position at UC San Diego in 1974. He became professor emeritus in 1994.
After retiring from UC San Diego, Lyon continued to teach at Brigham Young University for 14 additional years, ending his academic career after 43 years as an internationally respected scholar of German language and literature. In his career, he was among the few native-born U.S. citizens to present research in then-East Germany, or to hold a chair as a visiting professor at a German university.
A devoted husband and father to eight children, Jamie Lyon loved people and was a friend to all he met. He exemplified the virtues of kindness and love to those he greeted with warmth and friendliness. He was well-loved by all of his students.
Services for Lyon were held in Utah in late July.
