George S. Howard, a cheerful iconoclast in his chosen field of psychology, was a gregarious man and a master storyteller. He loved chatting with students, colleagues and even strangers, who often became his friends. For years, he joined in lunchtime euchre games with staff members in the Haggar Hall break room.
A professor emeritus of psychology, Howard died October 2. He was 77 years old.
Born in Bayonne, New Jersey, Howard studied at Marist College and Southern Illinois University, arriving at Notre Dame in 1981 and serving on the faculty for 34 years. His work focused on improving research methodology in applied areas of psychology, including assertion training, communication and interviewing skills, and the improvement of teaching.
“He was a contrarian in many respects. He enjoyed upsetting conventional wisdom,” not in a mean-spirited manner, but rather to challenge others to examine issues from new perspectives. said Scott Maxwell, professor emeritus of psychology. The phrase “thinking outside the box” is a good way to describe Howard’s personality, Maxwell said, because he didn’t want people to take their ideas for granted. “He wanted to get at the truth.”
Howard was interested in UFOs and extrasensory perception, and he studied ghost sightings on campus. Did such apparitions really exist? “Nah,” Howard said in a 2009 Notre Dame Magazine interview. “No more than there are spaceships that take people away.” Literally millions of people around the world have claimed to be abducted by aliens in UFOs, added Howard, a coauthor of UFOs & Alien Contact: Two Centuries of Mystery.
For Howard, UFO abduction narratives and ghost stories fell within the spectrum of an essentially normal psychological condition he termed “fantasy prone,” the ability “to let yourself get sucked into a partially realistic but also partially fanciful story.” Such fantasies can be risky to one’s reputation, he maintained. On the other hand, he said, anyone who argues that since ghosts aren’t real, believers must be lunatics, “doesn’t understand that we’re all lunatics to a certain extent. It’s just that I tend to work my lunacy through fantasy football.”
Known to arrive at his campus office as early as 4 a.m., Howard was a prolific scholar who produced 15 books and more than 150 journal articles. He supervised more than 70 master’s theses and doctoral dissertations, twice served as psychology department chair and in 1998 received a faculty award for distinguished contributions in scholarship and teaching.
An environmentalist, Howard cofounded Inovateus Solar, an energy supply and development firm, in 2008. He is survived by his wife, Nancy Gulanick, two sons and two grandsons.
Jill Godmilow didn’t rely on archival footage, authentic locations and traditional presentations of historical events in creating her films. She embraced postmodern filmmaking that blurred the lines between fact and fiction, moving beyond a purely objective or “real” recording of events. She questioned the nature of truth itself.
Godmilow, a professor emerita of film, television and theatre, was an independent film and video maker for more than five decades. Arriving at Notre Dame in 1992 she served on the faculty for nearly 20 years.
“Jill was intimidating and egalitarian, in equal doses,” said Ricky Herbst ’04, a former student of Godmilow’s and now the cinema program director at the University’s DeBartolo Performing Arts Center.
Godmilow had three rules for student filmmakers: no confession scenes, no dorm scenes, no cafeteria scenes. The idea was to get students out in the world, in places beyond their daily existence. “Art is meant to open up cracks and force new holes in culture to make space for what’s new,” she told a student reporter in 1995.
She didn’t fit the mold of a traditional professor. She lived in a former neighborhood grocery store on South Bend’s west side and preferred thrifting to buying new. She was a regular participant in social justice demonstrations on and off campus.
“Jill and Notre Dame were an odd couple,
but the relationship worked,” Herbst said. “She
wasn’t interested in assimilating.” Godmilow and others created Watch, an organization that focused on mentoring younger female faculty and gender-equity pay issues, and she cofounded the Notre Dame Progressive Faculty/Staff Alliance.
Born Joan Godmilow, she and her sister attended a suburban Philadelphia high school where they were the only Jewish students. As a teen she protested the U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities and spent a summer volunteering at a Quaker work camp in Missouri, putting tin roofs on sharecroppers’ houses and spending time in Gospel churches.
She earned a bachelor’s degree in Russian literature from the University of Wisconsin in 1965, and soon started in film with no formal training. The French New Wave cinema of the 1960s, Godmilow told Notre Dame Magazine in 2000, “made filmmaking look like anybody could do it.” She and her then-boyfriend borrowed equipment and made a feature-length film. “We made every mistake in the book,” she recalled.
Her 1974 film, Antonia: A Portrait of the Woman, in collaboration with folk singer Judy Collins, was nominated for an Academy Award and was later added to the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress. Her 1987 feature about the literary couple Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein, Waiting for the Moon, was produced for American Playhouse on PBS and won first prize at the Sundance Film Festival.
Many students spent long hours with Godmilow on the top floor of O’Shaughnessy Hall, which she had converted into a space to house her office, classroom and props from past films. There she chain-smoked cigarettes — well after bans were in place — while helping students edit their films, Herbst recalled.
She earned a Guggenheim Fellowship and two Rockefeller Fellowships and cofounded the nonprofit Laboratory for Icon & Idiom — now known as IndieCollect, an organization dedicated to rescuing, restoring and archiving independent films. Her last book, Kill the Documentary: A Letter to Filmmakers, Students, and Scholars, was published in 2022. One review called it “a brilliant, angry book.”
Godmilow died September 15. She was 81 years old.
Cornelius Delaney Sr., a scholar of pragmatism credited with elevating Notre Dame’s philosophy department to international recognition as its chair in the 1970s, began his career at age 15 by taking a job in a pharmacy to support his family after the death of his father.
Delaney, a professor emeritus of philosophy, died October 18 at age 87.
Born in Waterbury, Connecticut, he carried through life the values he felt his Irish immigrant parents had instilled in him: hard work, hope and a good sense of humor. He entered seminary after graduating high school but soon left to focus on philosophy, eventually earning his doctorate from Saint Louis University. During his 52 years at Notre Dame before his retirement in 2019, Delaney published more than 50 academic articles and wrote or edited several books, including Science, Knowledge, and Mind: A Study in the Philosophy of C.S. Peirce.
“Philosophers can be boring; Neil was not,” said Jeff Speaks ’97, the George N. Shuster Professor of Philosophy. Delaney “was a great conversationalist, quick-witted, funny and had a wide-ranging intellect. He was as at home talking about art or literature or Notre Dame football as about philosophy. He was the backbone of the department for decades and will be sorely missed,” Speaks said.
Delaney was the department chair from 1971 to 1982, director of the University’s London Program and, for 25 years, the Arts & Letters director of what is now known as the Glynn Family Honors Program. His many honors include the Madden, Kaneb and Sheedy teaching awards and the President’s Award for achievements that advance the University’s goals.
A lifelong athlete, Delaney played tennis and baseball as a youth and continued to play tennis in adulthood, maintaining a full calendar of court dates and winning several divisional titles in the South Bend city tournament. He was preceded in death by Helen, his wife of more than 50 years, and his son, Neil Jr., and is survived by a grandson.