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DOWNING COLLEGE 2009–2010His broader academic interests include questions of geopolitics, sovereignty,nationalism and nationalist movements, migration, diaspora and statelessness,particularly relating to the Middle East. He has been getting used to a heavyteaching load, directing studies for our geography undergraduates, and startingwork on a book. The highlight of his year was being stranded in WashingtonDC at the height of the Icelandic volcanic eruption, after presenting atthe Association of American Geographers conference.O BITUARIESJohn Wyon Burrow (Fellow 1962–65) died on November 3rd 2009 aged 74,after a rewarding and geographically varied academic career with a particularbent towards historiography. Born in Plymouth in 1935 and schooled in Exeter,he then won a history scholarship to Christ’s College, Cambridge. On beingelected to a research fellowship there, in 1959, he explored the contributionsof three figures in the wider intellectual life of the Victorian era – Henry Maine,Herbert Spencer and E B Tylor – towards the understanding of socialphenomena in evolutionary terms. His book, Evolution and Society (1966) wasbased on that dissertation. There followed his three years at Downing, wherehe was also Director of Studies from 1963, a role to which he devoted particularenergy as a source of inspiration to his students. He then spent four years as alecturer in history at the University of East Anglia, before a much longer tenureat the University of Sussex. There, with like-minded colleagues Donald Winchand Stefan Collini, he established bachelors’ and masters’ degrees in intellectualhistory, for many years the only ones in the country, and wrote That Noble Scienceof Politics (1983). At this time he began to focus on historiography with a studyof 19th century Whig historians, A Liberal Descent (1981), which was awardedthe Wolfson Prize for history. In 1995 Burrow took up the newly-founded chairin European Thought at Oxford, which brought with it a fellowship at Balliol.In 2000 his longstanding interest in wider European intellectual history borefruit in The Crisis of Reason: European Thought, 1848–1914, and the culminationof his distinctive academic career came with the publication in 2007 of A Historyof Histories, a highly readable as well as deeply knowledgeable account of thewhole sweep of historical writing in the West, from Herodotus and Thucydidesto the 20th century. In the following year he received a diagnosis of terminalcancer, when his prime concern was to be able to take up a visiting appointmentat Williams College, Massachusetts, the remuneration for which he hopedwould help to provide for his family. He was survived by his wife of fifty oneyears, Diane, and two children.115