April 21, 2004

To:        The St. Lawrence University Community

From:      President Daniel F. Sullivan

It is with a very heavy heart, and with deepest sympathy for Bill, Will, and 
her family, that I write to say that Flint Professor of Fine Arts Elizabeth L. 
Kahn died last night.  No faculty member anywhere could be more committed to 
her students, more in love with her vocation.  With profound courage and 
energy, in the face of a devastating illness, Liz taught these recent weeks 
and months every day it was even remotely physically possible for her to do 
so.  She was, to Ann and me, with Bill and Will, also a neighbor and a 
friend. We came together often on evenings in the spring, summer and fall, 
for our dogs Cindy and Mosely to romp in the back yard.  How sorely we 
will miss her. 

I will never forget her evident feelings of accomplishment and pride when, 
after many years of work, in 2003 her book Marie Laurencin: Une Femme Inadaptée 
in Feminist Histories of Art was published to very favorable reviews.  Liz was 
a serious, devoted, and wonderfully able scholar. 

A graduate of the University of Wisconsin, Liz earned a master’s degree from 
the University of Pittsburgh and her Ph.D. from UCLA.  She joined the St. Lawrence 
faculty in 1978; in 2002, she was appointed to the L.M. Flint Chair in Fine Arts.  
Liz also authored the 1984 book The Neglected Majority: ‘Les Camofleurs,’ Art 
History and World War I and a chapter of the 1997 anthology Modernism, Gender and 
Culture:  A Cultural Studies Approach.  In 1986, she delivered the Frank P. Piskor 
Lecture on “Your Home Isn’t Safe Anymore: The Cubist House and the French 
Decorative Arts of 1912.”  One year later, Liz co-directed the St. Lawrence Festival 
of the Arts on the topic “Art and the Vietnam Era: The Politics of Memory.”

Ann and I, and the entire St. Lawrence University community, share the grief felt 
by Liz’s family, her colleagues, students and friends.  You are close in our thoughts.

A memorial service for Elizabeth Kahn will be held Saturday, April 24 at 3 p.m. in 
Gunnison Chapel.  

In lieu of flowers, her family asks that expressions of condolence might be in the 
form of gifts to the Elizabeth Louise Kahn Scholarship Fund, c/o St. Lawrence University,
or Hospice of St. Lawrence County, PO Box 469, potsdam, NY 13676.

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