Alexander “Sandy” Welsh, UCLA professor emeritus of English and one of the leading scholars of his time in the field of British prose, died April 11. He was 84.
Welsh, whose scholarship and teaching included 19th-century studies, Shakespeare and James Joyce, law and literature, ethics and literature, social and literary history, comparative studies in the novel and drama and Freud studies, taught at Yale University and the University of Pittsburgh before joining UCLA in 1980. He rejoined Yale in 1991.
During the course of his career, Welsh wrote many books, including “The City of Dickens” (1971), “Reflections on the Hero as Quixote” (1981), “From Copyright to Copperfield: The Identity of Dickens” (1987), “Hamlet in His Modern Guises” (2001), “What is Honor? A Question of Moral Imperatives” (2008) and “The Humanist Comedy” (2014). He also edited a number of other books.
In addition, Welsh received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Rockefeller Foundation and the National Humanities Center. He was also a Harvard National Scholar and served with the U.S. Army in Germany.
Welsh is survived by longtime partner Ruth Yeazell and his children Molly Welsh Hoffman, Thomas Welsh and William Douglas Welsh.