ORONO, Maine — The University of Maine history department received another blow Monday when professor Marli Weiner died, the second UMaine history faculty member to die this semester.
Wiebke Ipsen, a 38-year-old assistant professor who specialized in Latin American history, died Jan. 27.
Both women had cancer.
Weiner had been at the university since 1988, while Ipsen arrived in Orono in 2006.
“It’s a tragic loss. As one of my colleagues put it, it’s an unreal feeling for us,” said history department chairman and professor Nathan Godfried. “A relatively new and young faculty member who we’d had great hopes for, and then one of the cornerstones of our department. Marli had been here many, many years. She was a de-voted teacher and a mentor in the true sense of the word, especially with graduate students.”
Godfried said Weiner, 56, was working with graduate students, reading doctoral work, while she was sick. One of her graduate students, doctoral candidate Shannon Risk, received a Fulbright U.S. Student Scholarship to study cultural and intellectual history in Canada for the 2008-09 academic year. Risk is only the eighth UMaine graduate student since 1992 to receive a Canadian Fulbright.
Weiner, whose expertise was in U.S. 19th century history, women’s history, the South, and black history, had been the Adelaide & Alan Bird professor of history since 2005.
She earned her bachelor’s degree from Johns Hopkins University, a master’s degree from Sarah Lawrence College, and her doctorate from University of Rochester.
Weiner was the editor of “Of Place and Gender: Women in Maine History,” which was published by the University of Maine Press in 2005.
Godfried said word about Weiner’s death is slowly getting to students, who are on spring vacation.
Funeral services will be held for Weiner at 2 p.m. today at the Jewish Funeral Chapel, 118 Center St.
Ipsen taught undergraduate courses in Latin American history. Her expertise was in issues of gender and nation-building in Brazil in the late 19th century.
She received undergraduate degrees in Germany and had both undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of San Francisco and San Francisco State. She earned her doctorate in 2005 from the University of California-Irvine and joined the UMaine faculty in 2006.
The history department will hold a memorial service in Ipsen’s honor at 3:10 p.m. Friday, March 27, in the Bodwell area of the Collins Center for the Arts. The service will be open to the public.
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