In the 2000s and 2010s, a Kirkland Drama Society show was not complete without a cameo from Tom C. Conley, the House’s then faculty dean.

The part was always small, according to Marielle E. Woods ’08, a founding member of the society. In “Macbeth,” they cast him as the porter.

“I think he had maybe a couple of lines, but Tom, being Tom, monologued and kept the scene going,” Woods said. “He was just a star.”

Conley died unexpectedly in July at the age 83 due to health complications, according to his wife Verena Conley. He is survived by his wife and their two children.

Conley led Kirkland as faculty dean from 2000 to 2020, alongside Verena Conley, overseeing thousands of students. He was also the Abbott Lawrence Lowell Professor, teaching in both the Art, Film, and Visual Studies and the Romance Languages and Literatures departments, where he earned prestige for his scholarship on early modern French literature and film.

But Kirkland residents knew him best for his willingness to throw himself into House traditions, his efforts to connect with students, and his enthusiasm for a range of interests including cinema, American sports, and wine.

‘The Happiest Years of Our Lives’

During Conley’s two decades at Kirkland, he oversaw the revival of old traditions — such as the reimagining of the House’s former Shakespeare night as a drama society — and actively helped grow new ones.

Chief among them was the Kirkland Wine Seminar, which Conley, known for his love of wine, taught for graduating seniors in the House’s Junior Common Room from 2005 until he stepped down.

Anna M. F. McCallie ’08, who served as a teaching fellow for the seminar, remembered Conley’s democratic teaching style. Students would sample new wines as he lectured on their origins, told stories from his travels, and asked students to identify the subtle notes in bottles from his collection.

“People would try to do their best, and every single thing they’d come up with — pomegranate, cherry, whatever – he’d be like, ‘Oh yes, yes, no, of course, sharp palate you’ve got,’” McCallie said. “Even if you were so wrong, even if you said something so ridiculous, he would just say, ‘Oh, oh, fascinating! I didn’t get that myself, but I can see how, if this vine were grown on the northern slopes of the Loire,’ — and it was just that kind of stuff.”

As the seminar grew more popular, students and staff began to start their own versions. At one point, Kirkland hosted beer, scotch, and kimchi seminars.

“I think we learned from him that it’s not that we needed to care about wine specifically or care about the Red Sox specifically, but that we should find whatever our version of that is, and share it with the house,” said Kate Drizos Cavell, who was Kirkland House administrator for 11 years under Conley.

Vivek G. Ramaswamy ’07, the Republican nominee for governor of Ohio, wrote in a statement that Conley demonstrated “stalwart” leadership on a chilly Kirkland retreat to Cape Cod.

“No one planned to get into the frigid water,” Ramaswamy wrote. “Tom showed up, took off his shirt, jumped right in and started to swim. Didn’t think twice, and eventually a number of students followed.”

Conley also often took center stage in Kirkland’s then-infamous Secret Santa celebrations, where gifts frequently came in the form of performances staged at the giftee’s request.

When Brittany N. Ellis ’19, a former Crimson News editor, asked Conley to help with an elaborate gift crowning her giftee “King of Kirkland,” he conducted the ceremony with his own sword on the steps outside the dining hall, delivering a dramatic monologue in Latin.

“I think that really kind of defined his tenure as someone that took this responsibility seriously, but didn’t really take himself too seriously,” Ellis said. “Was never above kind of joining in with the rest of us.”

Conley — who several former House affiliates described as omnipresent in the dining hall, at intramurals, and at House events — expected the same of other Kirkland staff. He sat in on practice panels for Kirkland seniors applying for fellowships, and reviewed every pre-med recommendation letter, always adding at least one comment, according to former pre-med tutor Mai Anh Huynh ’04.

“It just reflected the level of his attention to detail, but also how much he really knew the students well too, and could add some personal touch to the letter,” Huynh said.

“He was always interested in our work,” Clayton “Clay” Capp ’06 said. “He would ask me all the time what I was working on, not just my senior thesis, but other projects and stuff. He — and Verena too — would always ask how it was going or what I was interested in.”

Verena Conley said the couple truly enjoyed serving in the faculty dean role.

“These were some of the happiest years of our lives,” she said.

‘Like Listening to an Orchestra’

Steven Ungar, a University of Iowa professor emeritus, who co-edited a book with Conley on national identity in France, met him while the two were pursuing degrees at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Soon after, Ungar recalled, they started conversing about how academics would eventually have to decide how much they want to specialize.

Ungar pointed to how French scholars would often choose to restrict themselves to a single century: a seiziémiste to the 16th century, a dix-septiémiste to the 17th, and so on.

“And he said, ‘And you can do that your whole life. And someone will write an obit for you, and say he was at his desk or she was at her desk at midnight, and the next morning we went down and he was dead,’” Ungar said.

“Tom felt that that was one way to go about being a professional scholar of language and literature, but he said he wanted to do something more. He refused to be a dull teacher,” he added.

Conley’s career bore that out, according to scholars familiar with his work. After earning his doctorate at Wisconsin, he taught French and Italian at the University of Minnesota for more than two decades before arriving at Harvard in 1995. His work examined the relationship between space and art, tracing the connections among cartography, literature, and film. He won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2003 and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016.

Conley was also known for his dedication to his students. In March 2025, he received an Everett I. Mendelssohn Excellence in Mentoring Award, which is given annually to Harvard faculty who are nominated by graduate students.

“He was really happy with that,” Verena Conley said.

Several students and faculty who knew Conley said he would casually quote French in everyday conversation.

AFVS Chair David Joselit, who first met Conley while serving on the visiting committee for the History of Art and Architecture department, recalled him regularly citing French literature.

“One of the things that Tom was really particularly known for is he would quote, make highly sophisticated quotes from French literature of various eras that were appropriate for an occasion,” Joselit said, adding that in committee meetings the citations often lightened the mood and reminded those around him of their faith in literature and history.

According to Drizos, Conley was a talented writer himself — even in House emails.

“Reading one of Tom’s emails was like listening to an orchestra,” she said.

AFVS professor Laura A. Frahm also pointed to what she labeled Conley’s “masterful, impromptu” citations of French writers, but wrote that his generosity outstripped his erudition.

“It was Tom’s generosity that was truly boundless — as a colleague, as a teacher, as a mentor, and as a friend,” she wrote. “Tom had an incredible gift to instill enthusiasm in others; every personal or written conversation was filled with a sense of joy and excitement, with wit and poetry.”

“It just was inspiring to work around him because you felt like the mission of the University, which is really to cultivate knowledge and to convey it to students and to the world, was something that you know he believed in really profoundly,” Joselit said.

‘Sheer Joy in Living’

Conley’s enthusiasm ranged far beyond his academic interests, according to several former colleagues and students, to food, baseball and cooking.

“He was very intense. He loved to cook. He baked bread in the ’60s when we were there, and he was belle bouche, very fine mouth,” Ungar said. “He could talk to you about American sports. He could talk to you about French mapping. He could talk to you about poetry in the 16th and 19th centuries. He was a polymath in topics and in languages.”

John D. Cella ’08 said Conley would form unique connections between his academic interests and personal hobbies.

“He had this amazing way of connecting his really interesting intellectual interests and scholarship when it came to anything from French cinema and French literature to just conversations about sports,” Cella said. “People just enjoyed being around him.”

According to Ungar, baseball was a common ground between the two. They kept up a running bit, challenging each other to see how many names of players they could remember.

“This became a kind of communication that was a common base for the two of us,” he said.

Drizos remembered Conley’s passion for baseball becoming another way to bring the House closer together. She said he would sit out on the Kirkland patio and listen to Red Sox games, often with Bob Butler, Kirkland’s longtime security guard.

“The two of them both had a passion for the Red Sox, and they could talk endlessly about the team and would watch games together,” she said. “And then that’s another slice of home, right? Students would walk by the patio and then students would join them watching the game, and it was a way to build community and keep us safe because we all started to get to know each other that way.”

Students and faculty described an enthusiasm that extended past Conley’s interests to life itself.

Nicolas Weninger ’20, a former Kirkland resident, said Conley’s “zest for living a good life” was infectious enough to permeate the entire House community.

Verena Conley said that joy showed up most in the way her husband handled ordinary tasks.

“His ability to translate the drabness of everyday life into something poetic — a lot of people have commented on that,” she said. “The effortlessness in which he translated these everyday occurrences and situations into something really highly poetic.”

A celebration of Conley’s life will be held Sunday, Oct. 25 at 2 p.m. in Carpenter Center Theatre, followed by a reception on the building’s first floor.

—Staff writer Sebastian B. Connolly can be reached at [email protected] or on Signal at sbc.23. Follow him on X @SebastianC4784.

—Staff writer Summer E. Rose can be reached at [email protected] or on Signal at ser.85. Follow her on X @summerellenrose.