Robert E. Neil Papers, 1783-1988

Robert Elgy Neil was a professor of history at Oberlin College for twenty-eight years, from 1960 to 1988. He was born in 1931 in Findlay, Ohio. He did his undergraduate work at Oberlin, graduating at the head of his class in 1953. From Oberlin he went on to Harvard University with a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. After one year of graduate study, he was drafted into the army, and served at Fort Bliss, Texas. Upon completion of a course in anti-aircraft radar electronics, he became an instructor in that field.

At the end of his military service he returned to Harvard, where he was elected to the Harvard Society of Fellows in 1957. After finishing his PhD coursework, he was offered a teaching position at Harvard, but he declined in favor of a position at Oberlin. By the time he completed his doctoral thesis in 1963 on the Nazi Revolution, he was drawing crowds at Oberlin to his lectures, and gained attention elsewhere though his first scholarly article, on the Reichstag fire. His career specialty was the rise and fall of Nazi Germany.

Neil served on a number of faculty committees at Oberlin, as well as holding the history department chairpersonship for two terms. He was a dedicated and popular teacher, known for his compelling lectures. In 1986 Neil was awarded the Inda Howland and Frederick B. Artz Prize for Excellence in Teaching.

In 1975 Neil married Marie-Thérèse Wernert, Lecturer in French and Price French House Director at Oberlin College in 1974-75. He played the clarinet and piano as an unprofessional but accomplished musician. In 1988 he suffered a stroke and did not return to teaching. For the last eleven years of his life he lived with leukemia. Robert Neil died on February 13, 1991.

Sources

“Minute Adopted by the General Faculty of Oberlin College in Memory of Robert Elgy

Neil” by Geoffrey T. Blodgett, March 19, 1991. Faculty file for Robert E. Neil

(RG 28).

Faculty file of Marie-Thérèse Wernert Neil (RG 28).