Professor Emeritus of French and Comparative Literature
Marc Temmer (1922–2014) was born in Brooklyn, New York and raised in Switzerland. He returned to the United States and served in the U.S. Army during WWII. Following the war, he earned a Ph.D. in French at Yale University. He taught at Brown University and the University of New Mexico before joining the French faculty at UC Santa Barbara, where he remained for 35 years until retirement. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Camargo Foundation Fellowship while at UCSB.
Marc’s scholarship focused on French and comparative literature of the eighteenth century. His publications include Time in Rousseau and Kant (Geneva: Droz, 1953), Art and Influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Pastoral, Goethe, Godfried Keller, and Other Essays (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1973), and Samuel Johnson and Three Infidels: Rousseau, Voltaire, Diderot (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988).
In addition to his scholarly work, Marc published three volumes of poetry written in French.