Jonathan Evans announced today on ANSAXNET that Steve Glosecki passed away yesterday. While his death comes as no surprise, it’s no less easy to process. I met Steve many years ago when he chaired my first Kalamazoo presentation. (( that’s the International Congress on Medieval Studies, held annually at Western Michigan U. in Kalamazoo for my non-medievalist readers )) I was a nervous new Ph.D. student giving my first national conference presentation (a semantic-field study of killing in Beowulf), and he was warm and generous and did much to help put me at ease. A few years later, Steve presented in a Kalamazoo session I co-organized, and we’ve kept in touch over the years. When I’d skip K’zoo, more and more frequently of late as I’ve started attending MLA regularly, he’d send me an email saying, more or less, “I missed you at K’zoo this year, lad. You’re going to come next year, right.” (I know I don’t have his voice down, except for the lad bit).

I’m going to miss those messages. And him.