The Pomona College community lost Helena Wall, emerita professor of history, on Aug. 3. She was a colleague and friend whose influence will extend far into the future through the students she taught and mentored with distinction for 36 years. “Helena was the most brilliant of all Pomona faculty!” wrote colleague and art historian George Gorse. “To see her in faculty meetings or on committees was a lesson in oratory and profound insightfulness.”
Wall was born in 1955 in Queens, New York. She joined the College in 1984, not long after earning her Ph.D. in history at Harvard University. Her dissertation led to her book Fierce Communion: Family and Community in Early America. During her career, Wall’s research was supported through several National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships, as well as others from the Huntington Library (Mayer Fellow/Short-Term Fellow), the Harvard University Charles Warren Center, and the John Randolph and Dora Haynes Foundation. She received a Sontag Research Fellowship from Pomona and, in 1988-89, a Graves Award for early-career professors.
Until retiring in 2020, Wall held the Warren Finney Day History Professorship. She specialized in colonial and revolutionary America, early modern European history and American social history. Among her courses were Culture of Early America, Revolutionary America, 1750-1800, The American Political Tradition, and Doing History. Students voted her a Wig Distinguished Professor Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2008. “Professor Wall taught me to read, reflect critically and make connections,” Josh Nomkin ’13 wrote recently. “Her classes helped me become who I am today. I am so fortunate to have been her student.”
Ella Taranto ‘15 notes that “With little flash, she designed and delivered courses that drew out of her students clearer, better-argued, more nuanced ideas than we had been able to express before.” Wall, she remarks, “made it look easy: choosing complex texts, holding students accountable for weekly essays, providing sophisticated, in-depth feedback on each piece of writing and posing rigorous questions that unearthed the core of the topic at hand.”
Wall was a voracious reader, and students in her classes delved deeply into the literature of the field. Evan Preston ’12, one of those former students, says that “Several yards of my library are a testament to the intellectual life Helena Wall fostered. The discussions Helena facilitated in her seminars featured her remarkable talent to draw out of students a discipline of reasoning about historical inquiry, not simply learning facts but learning how to construct an argument about the significance of facts and defend that argument against scrutiny.”
Colleagues and students alike remember Wall’s impact on their lives and careers. Arash Khazeni, professor and chair of history at Pomona, recalls how Wall generously supported and mentored junior faculty and staff. “Those of us who knew and worked with Helena admired her deeply for her tenacious and passionate character, devotion to her students and abiding friendship,” he wrote.
Lindsay O’Neill ’01 followed in Wall’s professional footsteps and became a professor of British history at the University of Southern California. In a video on the occasion of Wall’s retirement, O’Neill said, “Thank you for your patience and kindness and the academic rigor you brought to all your classes. You guided a generation of scholars who are out there working today.”
Outside the classroom and in retirement, Wall continued to cheer for the New York Yankees and enjoyed her beloved dogs Buster and Maggie and cat Hillary. “Visiting her home in recent years often meant seeing the stacks of notes she’d write to encourage people to vote,” says Preston. “Helena helped me appreciate that the kind of American history we teach, write and publicly commemorate is the foundation for the kind of country we want to live in.” And, says Preston, “The authors and subjects Helena taught were an invitation to reckon with our past as Americans so that we might forge a better future.”
Wall succumbed to illness at her Claremont home. Services have not yet been announced.