Tom Moser devoted himself to the study of literature—especially British literature—but he was also a forward-looking leader who, as chair of Stanford’s English department, was responsible for hiring the first female faculty members and rallying the university to open satellite campuses in Europe.
Thomas Colborn Moser died at his home on the Stanford campus on June 3. He was 92.
A student at the University of Pittsburgh when he was drafted to serve during World War II, Moser used the GI Bill to earn two degrees at Harvard. After teaching at Wellesley College, he accepted a position at Stanford in 1956. He was director of freshman English from 1959 to 1962 before being named department chair.
According to his wife, Joyce Penn Moser, PhD ’75, he was a strong proponent of women’s rights and of diversity. “Tom really pushed the English department to hire women; there was not one female there when he arrived,” she said. “He also took a strong interest in helping younger faculty. . . . He told me about a Modern Language Association conference where some of the younger professors didn’t have a chance to speak, and Tom made sure that they did.”
Professor Emerita Barbara Gelpi said in a statement, “It doesn’t seem an overstatement to say that Tom made my professional life possible.” When Gelpi and her husband arrived at Stanford in 1968, she said Moser offered her “a chance to function in the profession that married women, and especially women with children, very rarely received at the time.”
An expert on Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford, Moser published a mix of literary criticism and psychological biography and won fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies in 1963 and the Guggenheim Foundation in 1979. In 2002, the Joseph Conrad Society of America recognized him with its highest honor, the Ian P. Watt Award. In 1980, Moser published The Life in the Fiction of Ford Madox Ford, a study of the British author leading up to his most famous novel, The Good Soldier.
Fredrika Moser, his daughter from his first marriage, to Mary Small Moser, who died in 1985, recalled how her father’s love for British literature carried over into family life. “One of our vacations was spent tromping around the English countryside and villages looking for the ruins of the Brontë house,” she said. “After hours in the typically damp British weather, my mother took pity on my brother and me and knocked on the door of a farmhouse to ask for shelter. A woman took us in and gave us tea; my father continued his search.”
In addition to his wife of 30 years and his daughter, Moser is survived by a son, Thomas Jr., PhD ’87, and three grandchildren.
Julie Muller Mitchell, '79, is a writer in San Francisco.
