Nicolae Iliescu, Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, Emeritus, marked his 25th year of Extension School teaching by interrupting his traditional course sequence on Dante's Divine Comedy to offer a graduate seminar, FORE E-121 Giovanni Boccaccio: The Decameron. Next year he will return to the Divine Comedy and examine selected cantos from the "Inferno" and "Paradiso" sections within a literary/historical as well as a theological/philosophical context.

"I always found that teaching Extension School students was more rewarding than teaching at Harvard College," Professor Iliescu admitted. "I have had a number of Extension School students--stockbrokers, airline pilots, housewives--who have followed me from course to course at the School, and who have studied with me because of their love of literature and because they truly wanted to learn what I love to teach." The population upheavals caused by World War II and several strokes of good fortune led Nicolae Iliescu from a 300-person mountain village in Romania to Harvard University. The outbreak of the war found him first a student at the University of Bucharest, then an unwilling air force pilot, and later a conscript soldier on the Russian front. As Germany fell apart, he headed west to the French area of occupation, and through the kindness of a German professor in Vienna, he was encouraged to study at the University of Padua, where he completed his first doctorate in just two years. A UNESCO fellowship allowed him a year of post-doctoral study there, followed by emigration to the United States, where he found work at a Ford plant in Cleveland, Ohio. A fellow Romanian academic who had studied at Harvard encouraged him to leave the assembly line and apply to the University's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Even though his English language skills were minimal, he applied, was accepted, and completed his second doctorate in under two years. "I was lucky; I was able to write all of my examinations in either French or Italian," Iliescu chuckled, recalling his graduate student days at Harvard.

An invitation to join the Harvard faculty as an instructor quickly followed, as well as a promotion to assistant professor and a Guggenheim Fellowship, which took him back to Italy for a year. When it came time for a tenure decision at Harvard, he and Professor Dante Della Terza were the final candidates for a single faculty position. Not wishing to lose either promising scholar or dynamic teacher, the University reached a Solomonic decision and tenured both.

Between Harvard's Romance Languages Department and the Extension School, Professor Iliescu alternated teaching courses and seminars on the Divine Comedy with Della Terza, Irving Babbitt Professor of Comparative Literature, Emeritus. In addition, Professor Iliescu offered courses in Romanian, his native language. Formally retired from University responsibilities, Professor Iliescu has concentrated in recent years on rereading Dante and on helping his native Romania to overcome the ravages of more than four decades of Communist rule. Currently, he is putting the finishing touches on a history of Romania between the two World Wars and on translating into Romanian much of his scholarly writing, originally written in Italian, for the benefit of university students there.

Each summer he returns to Romania, the country where he was sentenced to death in absentia for treason, and where the male members of his family were imprisoned in retaliation for his "escaping" to the West. "I am a peasant at heart," he remarked, "and I recall my boyhood, roaming barefoot in the mountains near the village where I was born. I want to continue to help my country, now that it is 'free' once again."

At the annual June banquet of the Harvard Extension Alumni Association, Professor Iliescu will be honored along with Erich Goldhagen, Fellow of the Kathryn W. and Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Russian Studies at Harvard (profiled in the fall 1996 Lamplighter), for 25 years of dedicated teaching.