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Wolfgang Natter (1955-2018) It is with deep sadness that we note the unexpected passing yesterday of Wolfgang Natter. Most recently he held the position of Vice President for Academic Affairs at The College of St. Scholastica in Duluth, Minnesota. Most critical geographers know Wolfgang from his nearly twenty-year career at the University of Kentucky, where he came to closely affiliate with the Department of Geography, and where his presence among faculty and students was legendary. Trained as a Germanist at John Hopkins University, Wolfgang's dissertation-based book, Literature at War, 1914-1940: Representing the "Time of Greatness" in Germany, was published by Yale. By the time it appeared Wolfgang had already moved on to establish two parallel tracks that would define his later academic life. The first was administrative. In 1990 he co-founded and co-directed UK's Committee on Social Theory, a learning community that continues to thrive today. Social Theory at Kentucky has been a model of research, teaching and community outreach. Wolfgang's vision, acumen, enthusiasm, and collectivizing spirit was essential in uniting dozens of scholars and scores of graduate students in the pursuit of questions and objects of analysis that lay at the intersection of traditional disciplines and post-disciplinary social, cultural, and political theory. A contract with Guilford Press would result in a series of co-edited volumes: Postmodern Contentions: Epochs, Politics, Space; Objectivity and its Other; and The Social and Political Body. And as difficult as it is to imagine translational social theory, Wolfgang was keen to ensure that theory made a difference. Through his efforts the Committee's good work was shared in civil society organizations around central Kentucky, Appalachia, and beyond. The second defining track of his career was in geography, his adopted field. He brought to the discipline a facility for theory that was deeply needed during some of the more slippery moments of the postmodern turn. He was fluent in 20th century literary theory, in German Romanticism, in the Frankfurt School, and in French poststructuralism. His wide-ranging contributions to geography can be found in articles and book chapters on cinematic geographies, geopolitics, radical democracy, the history of geographic thought, geography and literary theory, political ecology, identity theory, the body, and territory and scale. Wolfgang had an expansive personality and an excellent memory. It was not for nothing that so many young scholars would gravitate to his seminars - they sought him out for his kind and generous guidance as well as for his encyclopedic repertoire. He had an uncanny ability to position the latest fads within a long-arc lens. As befits a talented theorist, he was the closest of readers. We once had the pleasure of listening to him brilliantly unpack - over the course of a three-hour graduate seminar - a single paragraph from Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of the Enlightenment. We will greatly miss our friend and colleague, Wolfgang Natter. John Paul Jones III Theodore A. Schatzki University of Arizona University of Kentucky ---- John Paul Jones III, Dean College of Social and Behavioral Sciences 200 W. Douglass Building P. O. Box 210028 University of Arizona Tucson, Arizona 85721-0028 Tel: 520-621-1112 Fax: 520-621-9424 SBS Home: thepeoplecollege.arizona.edu<http://web.sbs.arizona.edu/college/> SBS News: snapshots.sbs.arizona.edu<http://snapshots.sbs.arizona.edu/> SBS Conversations: http://sbsdowntown.arizona.edu/ SBS Supporters: sbsmagazine.arizona.edu<http://sbsmagazine.arizona.edu/> [cid:image001.jpg@01CF597C.B8B43BB0] [cid:image002.jpg@01CF597C.B8B43BB0]<http://www.youtube.com/collegeofsbs> [cid:image003.jpg@01CF597C.B8B43BB0] <https://twitter.com/UA_SBS> [cid:image004.jpg@01CF597C.B8B43BB0] <https://www.facebook.com/UA.SBS> [cid:image005.jpg@01CF597C.B8B43BB0] <http://plus.google.com/photos/104388957916327102029/albums> [cid:image006.jpg@01CF597C.B8B43BB0] <https://issuu.com/sbstech/docs> [cid:image007.jpg@01CF597C.B8B43BB0] <http://snapshots.sbs.arizona.edu/archive.php> [cid:image008.jpg@01CF597C.B8B43BB0] <https://www2.uafoundation.org/netcommunity/sslpage.aspx?pid=347>