Research Professor Emeritus of French
Ronald Tobin (1936–2026) was born in Brooklyn, New York. He received a B.A. in French at Saint Peter’s College, then completed M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in French at Princeton University. From 1959 to 1960, he was a Fulbright fellow at the Université de Lille in France. Ron first taught at Williams College (1961–63), then at the University of Kansas (1963–69), where he became a Professor and Chair of the Department of French & Italian. In 1969, he was hired at UC Santa Barbara as Professor and was Chair of French and Italian in 1969–71 and again in 1975–80. He also long served as Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic Programs at UCSB (1989–2011).
Ron’s accomplishments in the field of French and Francophone studies earned him numerous awards and recognitions, including The Grand Prix du Rayonnement de la Langue et de la Littérature françaises in 2006, awarded by the Académie Française. Previously, in 2004, the august Société d’Histoire Littéraire de la France had received him as Sociétaire. He was knighted by the French Government five times and attained the rank of Commandeur, the highest, in the Order of Academic Palms in 2005. The Québec Government also honored Ron in 1999 by inducting him into the Ordre des francophones d’Amérique. In 2014, the Renaissance Française, a non-profit organization founded in France in 1916, presented Ron its highest award, la Médaille d’Or, for the promotion of French language and culture. While Editor-in-Chief of the French Review for 12 years (1986–98), Ronald Tobin’s decision to widen the journal’s coverage of francophone authors was recognized by the French Government through its honoring the French Review with the Georges Pompidou Prize.
Ronald Tobin’s writings, cover the great authors of the Classical Age from Descartes and Pascal through Corneille and Molière, to La Fontaine and Racine. He wrote or edited fifteen books (including three on Racine) and published some 200 journal articles, book reviews, and critical studies. In the most recent of the sixteen books he wrote or edited (L’Aventure racinienne, 2020), Ron continued to deepen the intertextual dimension of Racine’s creativity. He composed the first treatise ever devoted to food in French theater (Tarte à la crème: Comedy and Gastronomy in Molière’s Theater, 1999). At the time of his death, his research had returned to Molière, this time with a focus on the psychology of Molière’s audience in the Age of Trump.