My friend and colleague Richard H King, who has died aged 80 of a long-standing lung complaint, was an intellectual historian and emeritus professor in American studies at the University of Nottingham. Erudite across disciplines, he was generous and modest, always encouraging to younger colleagues.
An outstanding scholar and teacher in his field, he was the author of The Party of Eros: Radical Social Thought and the Realm of Freedom (1972), A Southern Renaissance: the Cultural Awakening of the American South, 1930-1955 (1980), Civil Rights and the Idea of Freedom (1992), Race, Culture and the Intellectuals, 1940-1970 (2004), and Arendt and America (2015). The depth of Richard’s writing enriched the study of ideas in America.
He was a cultured man with an interest in art and music. One colleague commented that he “was almost always the smartest guy in the room and the kindest”.
Richard was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, but spent most of his childhood in Chattanooga, where his parents, Dorothy (nee Howell) and Dawson King, ran a landscape nursery. He retained his gentle southern accent throughout his life, but was no traditionalist and had no time for nostalgia for the Old South. Rather, it was a concern for racial understanding and justice that drove much of his work.
He went to Brainerd junior high school in Chattanooga, then Chattanooga city high school, and studied history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, from 1959 to 1963. After a Fulbright year in Germany at the University of Göttingen in 1963-64, he took an MA in American studies at Yale, then a PhD in history at the University of Virginia (1967-71).
Putting his principles into practice, Richard taught at Federal City College, later the University of the District of Columbia, from 1968 to 1983, a college that specifically targeted Washington’s majority black population. But a turning point came with his 1977-78 Fulbright year at Nottingham and his permanent appointment there in 1983.
He remained in the UK for the rest of his career – becoming reader then professor, in 1993, at Nottingham – with temporary returns to the US, as visiting professor of Southern studies at the University of Mississippi (1989-90), fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington DC (1997-98), and Vaughn fellow in the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities at Vanderbilt University (2001-03). He retired from Nottingham in 2008. Though never a committee man by choice, Richard served as chair of the British Association for American Studies from 1992 to 1995, and was made one of the association’s first honorary fellows in 2009.
Richard married Nancy Landreth in 1967. The marriage ended in divorce in 1978. He married Charlotte Fallenius in 1988, and they made an ideal partnership, their interests shared, their home open to all their friends.
He is survived by Charlotte, her sons Christopher and Tim, grandchildren David and Anna, and his sister Lynn.
