Robert L. Benson; Author, Expert on German History
Robert L. Benson, 70, widely respected in Europe and the United States for his work on German history of the High Middle Ages. A native of Portland, Benson was educated at UC Berkeley and Princeton and served in the Army Air Corps during World War II. He taught at Barnard College, Wesleyan University and the Free University of Berlin before moving in 1974 to UCLA, where he taught until his retirement in 1994. A gifted speaker, he delivered the Carlyle Lectures at Oxford University in 1989 and was a visiting fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in 1993. He was the author or editor of several books on medieval church history, a fellow of the Medieval Academy of America and a corresponding member of the governing body of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica. On Sunday in Los Angeles of complications after a heart attack.
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