With the unexpected death of Professor Susanne Zantop, Dartmouth has lost a well-respected scholar, a true believer in the power of individuals and a friend to students and faculty alike.
Zantop was chair of the German studies department and was active in the comparative literature and women's studies programs. She also held the title of Parents' Distinguished Research Professor in the Humanities.
Susanne Zantop was born Aug. 12, 1945 in Kissingen, Germany. She studied political science in Berlin and at Stanford and studied comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts and later at Harvard, where she received a doctorate in 1984.
In 1982 Susanne Zantop joined the Dartmouth faculty in comparative literature. She soon began teaching in the German and Spanish departments as well and formally joined the German department in 1984. In 1996, she became its chair. She has also taught at Santiago de Compostela, Spain.
Her work has spanned many academic areas, from colonialism and feminism to 18th and 19th-century fiction, from her native Germany to Latin America.
Professor Zantop was "a real workhorse," according to Margaret Robinson, the German Studies department's academic assistant. Over the past 13 years, Zantop authored or edited eight books dealing with the topics of colonialism and gender. In addition, Robinson said that Zantop was a regular contributor to a number of scholarly journals.
Robinson had worked closely with Zantop for about 15 years in the German studies department. Robinson was also a personal friend of the Zantops and often socialized with them outside of academic settings, she said. They would cross-country ski, attend movies and eat meals together. When Robinson's husband died three years ago, the couple was very supportive of her, she added.
Robinson described Susanne Zantop as "a very alive person with a good sense of humor," well liked by students and faculty alike. According to Robinson, many former students remained in touch with Zantop after they graduated.
One of the highlights of Professor Zantop's literary career, according to her colleague and close friend Susannah Heschel, was her 1997 book "Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770-1870," which introduced a new idea to the study of colonialism: that even before Germany began to colonize other parts of the world, a colonialist mentality had become part of the national consciousness.
As a department chair, Zantop was a member of a number of College committees, Robinson said. She also said Zantop was currently planning a conference on post-colonial issues, which was scheduled to take place at Dartmouth in June. Now, Robinson said, without Zantop's driving force behind it, the conference is unlikely to happen.
Heschel talked about Zantop as a mentor to younger faculty members as well as a warm and generous friend, a prolific and talented writer and a voracious reader with a wide breadth of knowledge about many topics.
Heschel also praised her honesty and directness. "When she came to a lecture, even if it was [given by] a close friend, she wouldn't automatically praise you. She would tell you what she really thought," Heschel said. "She could be quite critical -- honest, but not mean."
Above all, Heschel praised Zantop's ability to produce work that had an effect on others. She spoke of her own experience two years ago when she was struggling to write an article. Lying in bed late at night, she thought of an idea she had recently read in one of Zantop's books. Heschel jumped out of bed, inspired by Zantop's thinking to find a new insight into her own article.
"There's a lot of smart people out there, but it's rare to find someone who can enter someone else's intellectual agenda," Heschel said.
