Carla Freccero: 1956 – 2026
Carla Freccero, Distinguished Professor and Chair of Literature at UC Santa Cruz, passed away on January 28 at Stanford Hospital at the age of 69. She was at peace and surrounded by loved ones.
Any attempt to describe Carla’s career must begin with the recognition that, more than a career, hers was a lifelong avocation for doing work that mattered. With seemingly limitless energy, she created and moved between multiple communities of colleagues and co-workers, students and mentees, from Santa Cruz to New York City. From the time of her arrival at UC Santa Cruz in 1991, Carla brought a truly extraordinary combination of intellectual firepower and institutional service not only to the Literature Department, but to Humanities and the campus as a whole. Her leadership across disciplines and units is legendary: four terms as Chair of Literature, intermittently between 2002 and 2025; one term as Chair of History of Consciousness (where she was also Graduate Director); a joint appointment in Women’s Studies/Feminist Studies (where she was instrumental in establishing the Institute for Advanced Feminist Research); Director of the Center for Cultural Studies from 2007-2012; Interim Dean for the Humanities and then Associate Dean; and a stalwart, valued member of multiple Academic Senate and other campus committees including CAP and CAAD (CODEI), which she chaired. Never one to insist on fixity, over those thirty-five years she witnessed many changes to the campus she loved, defending what she held as its highest values while creatively imagining new dimensions of its potential work.
In all these settings, she turned her own intellectual concerns outward for the benefit of others, especially through her powerful commitment to the training and mentoring of graduate students. A highly sought-after and beloved graduate teacher, she served on hundreds of doctoral and masters’ degree committees at UC Santa Cruz and elsewhere. More importantly, she made it her daily business to create new sources of support—intellectual, financial, professional—for all the students whose lives she touched.
Carla Freccero majored in History & Literature at Harvard and went on to complete her PhD in Renaissance Studies at Yale in 1984. She spent the first several years of her career in the Department of French & Italian at Dartmouth. On paper, Carla’s three books, three edited collections/special issues, and nearly eighty articles and book chapters speak to the impressive quantity of her scholarly contributions—as do the multiple prizes, grants, and honors she accumulated. But such a list would not begin to convey the astonishing breadth and depth of her work. Beginning as a specialist in sixteenth-century French, she became a prominent voice in “Rewriting the Renaissance” (as one of the collections to which she contributed was entitled) as it was being reconceptualized as “early modernity.” To Carla this was a perfect conjuncture, for while she was at home analyzing the links between the sixteenth century and the Classical past, her work would take wings exploring its continuities, discontinuities, and uncanny resonances with modernity and, especially, postmodernity. Gender, feminist, and queer studies were through-lines, linking her 1995-96 coedited volume Premodern Sexualities to her work on the sixteenth-century writers Louise Labé and Marguerite de Navarre and into her influential 2006 monograph Queer/Early/Modern, to name just a few examples. But her interest in the early modern discourse on cannibals also intersected with questions of coloniality, race, and what we would now recognize as post-human and monster studies.
At the same time, she remained resolutely engaged with the contemporary world: her 1999 book Popular Culture: An Introduction became an important classroom text. Carla’s interest in the boundaries of the human also led her to work that has become foundational in Animal Studies, anchored by her meditations on Derrida’s cats (on the one hand) and dogs and other canids (on the other). The constants were the fierce intelligence that Carla brought to all her writings: her intense engagement with theory, inhabiting difficult works from the inside, coupled with a philologist’s attentiveness to the way a word’s expansive genealogy and semantic networks might link seemingly disparate ideas and phenomena in astonishing ways.
As the Principal Investigator for the donor-funded Coha-Gunderson Prize in Speculative Futures, Carla curated student multimedia exhibits in 2025 and 2023. Her description of this intellectual and affective work captures her own living creativity. Speculative fictions (she writes) “give me hope, not only because I can imagine the worlds crafted in those texts, but also because there are people who can imagine such worlds, imagine them better, and bring them into being virtually. They are my people, as is the humus to which I will return, in an ancient technology of biotemporality’s making.” We grieve her too- soon return.
Carla is survived by her mother, three siblings, two nieces and a nephew, and her beloved Borzoi, Ruki. She will be mourned by innumerable friends, including current and former students.
We will pass along information about memorial activities as those are planned. In the meantime, you are invited to contribute notes and photos to the Department’s Kudoboard in Carla’s memory. For those who prefer a more analog technology, we will be setting up the bulletin board outside the third-floor Literature office as a space where people can leave notes or small memorials.