Arrivederci, Ernesto: A Remembrance of Professor Ernest B. Gilman (1946-2026)

Professor Ernest Gilman, my friend and mentor, died last week. Many called him Ernie, but I always called him Ernesto. He seemed to enjoy it. It was a holdover from his days teaching at NYU Florence, where, I learned at his funeral service, his full title was Ernesto il Magnifico! I never called him that.

Ernesto was one of the first professors I TA’d with at NYU—certainly the one I worked with the most. I probably heard his deliciously wicked lecture on Machiavelli ten times. No wonder it inspired a song I played with my band Gutter and Spine and later with my loop pedal—it even became part of my first one-woman show.

I went all kinds of wayward after finally squeaking out of grad school with my PhD, but when I published my first book about a dozen years later, I sent a copy to Ernesto. He reached out, and we picked up our friendship again when I returned to NYC in 2021.

In the very month that we returned—on my birthday—he called to tell me that he was in a pinch because his TA dropped out and would I be interested in teaching the familiar Antiquity and the Renaissance Core course again. Which is how I became the oldest TA in the world.

It was great fun to teach with him again after all those years. We had lots of laughs at our teaching “meetings” that included a negroni or two. The images in this post come from his PowerPoint lecture. I never was able to access them before. I think he’d get a kick out of me going through them with AI now.

Right around that time, he confessed to me that he learned from my magazine, Aromatica Poetica, that his smell loss had a name. So I challenged him to write a piece about it for AP, and within a week he sent me “Anosmia, My Newly Discovered Disability.” It’s one of my favorite pieces I’ve published—with a great featured illustration by Alabaster as well.

In that essay Ernesto also described living with prosopagnosia:

“In comparison with anosmia my inability to read faces has always been far more disabling. At least I am in good company, for what that’s worth. The late Oliver Sacks had it, not to mention Brad Pitt and the artist Chuck Close (famous for his portraits of faces). As it makes it hard for me to interact “normally” with other people, my chronic “face blindness” has not infrequently been a source of embarrassment and occasionally of mortification. Here’s where the “relationship difficulties” kick in. Unlike Dr. Sacks’ patient I am not likely to mistake my wife’s face for a hat, but I might well fail to recognize you if we should happen to run into each other on the street. Disguising my anxiety, I will snatch at any hint as to your identity, any kind of contextual clue, while pretending to know who you are, all the while hoping that you might say something that will ring a bell. Hairstyle helps with women, but if my interlocutor, say a student has put up her hair in a pony tail since I last saw her in class with flowing locks. I am utterly helpless. But that’s another story. The link between my anosmia and my prosopagnosia, however, is that in both cases I compensate by faking it.”

I think one of the reasons he felt comfortable with me—as well as my friend Elizabeth Bearden, also blind—is that, among the dozens or hundreds of students he might run into in any given day, we were ringers because of our guide dogs. He never had to worry about who we were—even if we changed our hair.

Being back in New York—after spending a couple years in his hometown of Denver—was exciting and stressful. I did not see him often after I taught with him in the fall of 2021. I’m so grateful then that he almost always sent a few kind words upon receiving my intermittent newsletters. Which is how it came to pass that we had dinner at the old Knickerbocker on University last December. He asked so many thoughtful questions about my photography project that the time flew. We even got kicked out because another reservation was waiting.

Two days later he called and left a voice message—said he had an idea.

“Here’s a classic,” he said when I returned his call. “John Berger’s Ways of Seeing.” I probably let out an audible eyeroll. But I promised to give it another try.

I wasn’t wrong that Berger is mostly concerned with painting. But a quick search for photography found this:

“Every image embodies a way of seeing. Even a photograph. For photographs are not, as is often assumed, a mechanical record. Every time we look at a photograph, we are aware, however slightly, of the photographer selecting that sight from an infinity of other possible sights.”

Of course, Ernesto was right. I emailed him to tell him so.

I immediately inserted that passage into the book, where it has remained ever since. It’s such a useful quote that it even made it into an essay I have forthcoming in Literary Hub later this month.

I wish Ernesto were here so I could send it to him.

“Snapshots” Slide by Ernesto

 

This and the featured image are from Ernesto’s 2021 PowerPoint for the first of two lectures bridging the Antiquity and the Renaissance.

Image Description: Across the top, centered in large red capital letters, is the heading: SNAPSHOTS. Below it, aligned on the left, is a bulleted outline of the lecture. The first item, 400 ce, is colored bright red, while all the remaining bullets are black. This tells students where they are in the lecture. As the lecture progresses, later versions of this slide will return with a different bullet highlighted in red, functioning almost like a “You Are Here” marker.

On the lower right sits an unexpected image: a vintage Leica camera. It has a polished brass body with reddish-brown leather covering and a brass lens cap bearing the Leica logo in cursive script. It looks like a beautifully restored early twentieth-century rangefinder camera.

 

Ernest B. Gilman, 1946-2026

Ernest B. Gilman, a longstanding professor of English at New York University, died on July 3, 2026. Lois Gilman, his partner, announced his death. Gilman joined the NYU faculty in the early 1980s, following a brief stint as an assistant professor at the University of Virginia. He taught lecture courses and conducted seminars on the literature and poetry of the English Renaissance. He also taught for brief periods at NYU’s campuses in London, Florence, and Shanghai. He took great pride in his teaching and stayed in touch with many of his graduate students throughout the years. One of those students, Dave Landreth, remembers that Gilman taught him “how to string together a semester’s worth of big ideas across a broad span and how to provide clear and generous help to students struggling to express themselves in writing—not to mention how to distinguish students who were struggling from students who were half-assing it. He had a rubber stamp for the latter of a cloud blowing hot air, which he would apply to particularly long and vacuous introductory paragraphs.”

Gilman’s intellectual interests ranged over a broader landscape than that of London and the English countryside in Shakespeare’s time. His doctoral thesis, written in the 1970s, explored what he called “The Curious Perspective.” The term referred to the ways that new discoveries in optics, such as the telescope and microscope—in addition to society’s fascination with optical illusions and perspective drawing—influenced literature, poetry, and drama across Europe in the 1600s. Yale University Press published an expanded version of his thesis in 1978. The dust jacket features a glowing recommendation from A. Bartlett Giamatti, himself a Renaissance scholar, who would go on to lead Yale. “This book will be indispensable to anyone teaching Renaissance literature,” Giamatti wrote. He added: “Those interested in comparing the ‘sister arts’ in whatever period will have to turn to Gilman’s introduction for the sanest and most intelligent discussion of methodology . . . that will exist.”

His second book, “Iconoclasm and Poetry in the English Reformation” (1986) explored how iconoclasm affected “The Faerie Queene,” “Paradise Lost,” and other works. In “Recollecting the Arundel Circle” (2002), Gilman returned to exploring the connections between literature and the visual arts. In this case, he described how the patronage of Thomas Howard, the 14th Earl of Arundel, drew together a diverse collection of poets, artists, and thinkers. With “Plague Writing in Early Modern England” (2009), Gilman began to explore ways that disease affected literature. This book examined the extraordinary impact that waves of the bubonic plague had on the work of Ben Jonson, John Donne, Samuel Pepys, and Daniel Defoe. Gilman argued that their work could be best understood as an attempt to “write out” the plague, to make sense of the senseless.

His recent work continued to explore the impact of disease on literature, but in a way that brought him back to his upbringing in Denver and to his Jewish faith. Denver, with its high altitude and dry climate, had become home to several tuberculosis sanatoriums in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. “Yiddish Poetry and the Tuberculosis Sanatorium, 1900-1970” (2014) focused on the work of three major immigrant poets whose experiences as T.B. patients had a profound impact on their work.

Ernest Bernard Gilman was born in Denver, the only child of Jack and Dorothy Gilman.  His father, a Polish immigrant, was a butcher; his mother was a homemaker. The family spoke Yiddish at home (but Gilman once called it “kitchen Yiddish,” simple phrases for everyday life.) He was always an outstanding student, and attended Columbia College in New York City on a National Merit scholarship. He graduated near the top of his class in 1968 and earned his doctorate from Columbia University in 1976.

He met his wife Lois (Prager), a 1970 Barnard graduate, in his senior year. He was the editor of the student newspaper’s literary supplement and she was one of the paper’s reporters.  They married a few months after Gilman graduated, but later divorced and then reconciled a few years later.  They never remarried. Their two children, Seth and Eve, also survive him, along with his son-in-law James Dolan and his two granddaughters Isadora and Imogen.