Margaret Schlauch

Margaret Schlauch (September 25, 1898 – July 19, 1986) was a scholar of medieval studies at New York University and later, after she left the United States for political reasons in 1951, at the University of Warsaw, where she headed the departments of English and General Linguistics. Her work covered many topics but included focuses on Chaucer, Anglo-Saxon, and Old Norse literature. Schlauch was born in Philadelphia; her father was a German-born professor of mathematics. She earned a bachelor's degree from Barnard College in 1918 and Master's and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia University in 1919 and 1927; in 1923–24, she studied at the University of Munich on a fellowship from the American Association of University Women. During her graduate studies she taught English at Theodore Roosevelt High School in New York. From 1924 to 1950, Schlauch was a faculty member in the English Department at Washington Square College (the then Greenwich Village undergraduate division) of New York University. She became an assistant professor in 1927, associate professor in 1931, and full professor in 1940, the first woman to be appointed a full professor at the university. She spent a summer as a visiting faculty member in German at the University of Chicago and another in English at Johns Hopkins University, and was a Guggenheim fellow in German and Scandinavian literature in 1929–30. During World War II, she assisted in the preparation of a course in Icelandic for the War Department, and at one point taught mathematics. Early in 1951, in response to a subpoena from the House Un-American Activities Committee, Schlauch left the United States for Poland, writing an explanatory letter to the chair of the English Department at New York University, Oscar Cargill, in which she stated that she had been "so very happy at N.Y.U.!" The university announced her resignation to the New York Times, where it was the subject of a "long, above-the-fold article". The story was picked up by the Associated Press. She taught at the University of Warsaw from 1951 until retiring in 1965.