IAN LANCASHIRE

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IAN LANCASHIRE

Professor Emeritus, University of Toronto; eminent scholar and innovator; generous colleague and mentor to students; Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada; published poet; avid golfer; loving husband, father, and grandfather; reluctant but eventual cat-lover: Ian Lancashire died unexpectedly April 3, 2025, in Toronto, of complications from covid. His family was with him. Born in Winnipeg November 27, 1942, to Ernest Lancashire and Elizabeth Lawton Lancashire, Ian received his B.A. (Honours) from the University of Manitoba in 1964, and then his M.A. (1965) and Ph.D. (1969) from the University of Toronto, where he was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, a Junior Fellow at Massey College (1966–68; Don of Hall 1967–68), and a pallbearer in 1968 for Vincent Massey. Appointed Lecturer (1968) and then Assistant Professor (1969) in the (then University College) English Department, University of Toronto, he first taught at Erindale College (now University of Toronto at Mississauga) and moved c. 1985 to New College, on the St. George campus, to collaborate in his research with Computer Science colleagues there. He became a full Professor in 1984.

His early research focused on Tudor drama and theatre history, the best known of his early publications being his highly influential edition of Two Tudor Interludes: The Interlude of Youth and Hickscorner (1980) and his 1984 essential reference volume, Dramatic Texts and Records of Britain: A Chronological Topography to 1558, still cited today by experts in the field. He was one of the three founders (1975) of Records of Early English Drama (REED), the project’s bibliographer (1975–81), and its ongoing adviser. In the 1980s, he became a pioneer in humanities computing in Canada: the founding director (1985–96) of a Centre (CCH, later CHASS), which became one of the best of its kind in the world, and team leader of the first-ever successful application to the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) for digital humanities projects. His individual, open-access, major computer assisted text and research projects all won international acclaim and users worldwide: the award-winning Representative Poetry Online (RPO), which he edited until 2012 and which by then contained over 3000 poems; the Early Modern English Dictionaries Database (EMEDD); and, since 2006, Lexicons of Early Modern English (LEME), a corpus and database project involving almost 300 encoded texts of dictionaries, glossaries, and other works, 1475-1755, relating to early modern English. The accumulated word entries total more than one million. He also published widely in the fields of historical lexicography, cognitive stylistics, corpus linguistics, and digital humanities, and in many other areas as well. One notable project, begun in 2009 with collaborators first in Computer Science and then also in Medicine, analyzed the vocabulary of the novels of Agatha Christie, in chronological order, finding evidence in them of the onset and then progressive worsening of dementia, and thus suggesting vocabulary studies as a potential tool for dementia diagnosis. This work drew coverage from international media, including being listed by the New York Times as presenting one of the 10 most innovative ideas of 2009. In his highly personal Forgetful Muses (2010), he developed a neuroscientific interpretation of creativity. A lover of Tolkein, he taught and wrote on science-fiction and fantasy. His total research publications at the time of his death, individual and collaborative, totalled well over 100.



Teaching was a joy to Ian, and after his retirement he continued to involve students in his research projects. Throughout his career he was also an in-demand advisor to many scholarly organizations and journals.

He was also a lifelong published poet, particularly interested in difficult poetic forms, and a lifelong golfer (enormously proud of his 2003 holein-one!) He celebrated family weddings and anniversaries with erudite yet deeply emotional poems. He was a gentle, caring man, stubborn about his research methods and goals, and with an astutely playful sense of humour.

Ian is survived and mourned by Anne (his wife for 57 years); his children, Susannah Mahaffy (Rob), David Lancashire (Xiaoyu), and Ruth Lancashire (Muriel Omnes); and his grandchildren, Cameron Mahaffy and Adalyn, Ayden, and Ashton Lancashire-Omnes.

In lieu of flowers, donations in his memory may be made to the Hospital for Sick Children, St. Joseph’s Health Centre Foundation, or the Toronto Wildlife Centre.

Tributes: www.ridleyfuneralhome.

As published in Winnipeg Free Press on Apr 19, 2025