CANTOR, Norman F(rank) 1929-2004

OBITUARY NOTICE— See index for CA sketch: Born 1929 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada; died of heart failure September 18, 2004, in Miami, FL. Historian, educator, and author. Cantor was a history professor best known for his books about medieval civilization in Europe. After graduating from the University of Manitoba in 1951, he immigrated to the United States, where he completed his master's and doctorate degrees at Princeton University in 1953 and 1957 respectively; he also studied at Oxford from 1954 to 1955 as a Rhodes scholar. His academic career began at Princeton, where he taught for two years before teaching at Columbia University from 1960 to 1966. During the late 1960s, he was a faculty member at Brandeis University, and during the early 1970s he taught at the State University of New York at Binghamton, where he also chaired the history department for four years, was provost of graduate studies and research for a year, and was vice president of academic affairs from 1975 to 1976. After teaching from 1976 to 1978 and serving as dean of the faculty of Arts and Sciences from 1978 to 1981 at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Cantor settled down at New York University. He joined the faculty there as professor of history, sociology, and comparative literature, retiring as professor emeritus in 1999; he also directed the Institute of Cultural Analysis from 1981 to 1987. As a writer, he was appreciated for his lucid prose and is best known for his book The Life and Death of a Civilization (1963), which was later revised as The Civilization of the Middle Ages (1993). Among his many other publications are Inventing the Middle Ages: The Lives, Works, and Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth Century (1991), which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle; The Sacred Chain: The History of the Jews (1994); In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made (2001); The Last Knight: The Twilight of the Middle Ages and the Birth of the Modern Era (2004); and Alexander the Great (2005). He was also the editor of The Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages, among many other works.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Chicago Tribune, September 24, 2004, section 3, p. 9.

Los Angeles Times, September 24, 2004, p. B9.

New York Times, September 21, 2004, p. A29.

Times (London, England), September 27, 2004, p. 56.