Robert “Bud” Foulke
Professor of English Emeritus Robert “Bud” Foulke, an accomplished literary and maritime scholar and travel writer who chaired the Department of English with wisdom for a decade and played an important role in its growth, died on Feb. 15, 2023. He was 92.
Bud, then a faculty member at Trinity College, was appointed professor and chair of Skidmore’s English Department in 1970, a tumultuous and divisive time across the United States and at many academic institutions.
“In just a matter of months he brought us together — colleagues young and old — by fostering respect. His decency and generosity of spirit brought out the best in all of us,” said Professor of English Emeritus Tom Lewis. “Through his sage advice and example, he served as a great mentor to his younger colleagues. His transformation made teaching and the pursuits of the profession at Skidmore a pleasure, something that wasn’t the case in many college English departments in those troubled times.”
Bud died at the Friendship Village retirement community near Minneapolis.
At Skidmore, he helped establish processes and committees with broad representation to handle important decisions, such as hiring and tenure, and went on to initiate reforms to the department’s first-year writing and introductory literature courses. A tribute for his retirement in 1992 described Bud as “honest, humane, learned, thoroughly open-minded, wise, self-critical, pulsing with new ideas, quick to cut through bilge, and indefatigable.”
An active teacher-scholar, he contributed to many programs at Skidmore, from the writing program to classics, and his scholarship ranged from Joseph Conrad to maritime history. A U.S. Navy veteran and former U.S. Naval Academy sailing instructor, Bud loved sailing and teaching accounts of sea voyages, and often took student groups to study at Mystic Seaport. During a sabbatical, he used his nautical background to chart Odysseus’ return from the Trojan War as described in Homer’s “Odyssey.” Tom Lewis described Bud’s book, “The Sea Voyage Narrative” (Routledge, 1997), as “a masterful sailor’s understanding of works by Homer, Melville, Conrad, and Hemingway” that “shows his extraordinary knowledge of maritime history.” Bud also served as literary editor for the Oxford Encyclopedia of Maritime History.
In retirement, Bud was an active travel writer and published a weekly travel column in the Glen Falls Post-Star and more than a dozen travel books with his wife of 67 years, Patty, on topics ranging from colonial America to traveling Europe by car. The couple also ran a sailing school in Lake George. Patty died in 2021.
Bud grew up in Minnesota. He studied at Princeton University and completed his master’s and doctoral degrees at the University of Minnesota.
He is survived by his children David ’83 (Lynn) and Carolyn; his grandchildren, Brianna, Robert, and Lauren; and his great-grandchild, Malachi. His wife, Patty, and daughter Deborah predecease him.