The American Academy in Rome mourns the passing of Charles Witke, 1962 Fellow and 1998 Resident, and Professor Emeritus of Greek and Latin at the University of Michigan. He died on March 21, 2026, at the age of 94.
Italy held a special place in Witke’s life. He first came to Rome as a Fulbright Fellow, and he joined the Academy as a Rome Prize Fellow in Ancient Studies in 1962. He returned to the Academy many times, including as a Resident in 1998. That spring he delivered the Rome Prize ceremony lecture, “Crisis and Continuity: Rome and Monte Cassino in the Eleventh Century.”
Witke was born in Los Angeles in 1931. He received his B.A. from UCLA in 1953 and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1957 and 1962. After a year at the University of Chicago, he taught at the University of California, Berkeley, where he chaired the Committee on Medieval Studies, and briefly at SUNY Binghamton, before joining the University of Michigan in 1971 as professor of classical studies and director of the Program in Comparative Literature.
He was the author of four monographs, including Latin Satire: The Structure of Persuasion (Brill, 1970) and Horace’s Roman Odes: A Critical Examination (Brill, 1983), as well as numerous scholarly articles. His later work included a translation of Erasmus’s Hyperaspistes. He was a beloved professor and colleague, and an ordained deacon and priest in the Episcopal Church.
His colleague at the University of Michigan, Elaine Gazda (2014 Resident and Trustee Emerita at the Academy), remembers him as “an engaging and witty presence in the Department of Classical Studies and an erudite colleague who wore his erudition lightly and took a kindly interest in the work of many of his colleagues, including my own.”