Hubert, Renée Riese 1916–2005

OBITUARY NOTICE—See index for CA sketch: Born July 2, 1916, in Wiesbaden, Germany; died of a heart attack May 18, 2005, in Newport Beach, CA. Educator and author. Hubert was a professor at the University of California at Irvine, where she taught French and comparative literature. Born in Germany to Jewish parents, she moved to France in 1933 and completed her undergraduate work at the University of Lyon in 1936, followed by a second degree at the University of Paris, Sorbonne, in 1939. When World War II began, she fled to England; there she took a teaching job until 1944, when she immigrated to Virginia, where her parents had settled. Hubert then attended Columbia University, earning an M.A. in 1945 and a Ph.D. in 1951. She began her teaching career at Sarah Lawrence College in 1951. Positions at Harvard University, Suffolk University, and San Fernando Valley State College followed during the rest of the 1950s. At her last post she became associate professor of French and German and head of San Fernando Valley State College's foreign-languages department in 1962. Hubert moved on to the University of Illinois in 1965, becoming a full professor the next year, and finally settled down at the University of California's Irvine campus in 1967, remaining there for the rest of her career. While at Irvine, Hubert helped to found the French and comparative literature graduate departments. She was the author of many scholarly texts on French literature, including several books in which she compared and contrasted developments in literature and art. In addition, Hubert was the author of several collections of poetry in French. Among her works are Surrealism and the Book (1988) and, with her husband, Judd D. Hubert, The Cutting Edge of Reading: Artists' Books (1999). Her poetry collections include La cité Borgne (1953), Asymptotes (1954), and Chants funebres (1964).

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PERIODICALS

Los Angeles Times, May 20, 2005, p. B10.