Wendorf, Richard
Biography
Richard Harold Wendorf was born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on March 17, 1948. In 1970 he received his B.A. from Williams College and in 1972 his B.Phil. from Oxford University. His M.A. (1974) and Ph.D. (1976) were both taken at Princeton University.
In 1976 Wendorf joined the Northwestern University faculty as assistant professor of English. He was promoted to associate professor in 1981 and professor of English and of art history in 1986. Wendorf served the College of Arts and Sciences as associate dean from 1984 to 1987, when he returned to Williams College, where he had been visiting professor in the fall of 1982-1983.
His primary research interests involved the eighteenth-century English poet William Collins, and the relationship between biography and portrait painting, Wendorf received a fellowship from the John Solomon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship at the Newberry Library in Chicago.
Wendorf wrote or edited four books. The Clarendon Press (Oxford) in 1979 published The Works of William Collins which Wendorf had edited with Charles Ryskamp. In 1981 the University of Minnesota published his full-length study, William Collins and Eighteenth-Century English Poetry. Two years later Minnesota published a festschrift to Jean Hagstrum, Articulate Images: The Sister Arts from Hogarth to Tennyson, edited by Wendorf. Wendorf's The Elements of Life: Biography and Portrait Painting in England 1630-1800 was published by Clarendon in 1986.
Wendorf and his first wife, Barbara, were divorced in 1983. He married Diana French on January 1, 1984.