Ulrich Camillus Knoepflmacher
1931 – 2026
Ulrich Camillus Knoepflmacher, age 95, passed away peacefully at his home in Princeton, NJ on September 4th, 2026.
Uli was born in Munich, Germany as the only child of George Knoepflmacher and Hilde Weiss. In 1939, following the Anschluss, the family emigrated from Vienna, where his father was working, to South America. Uli grew up in La Paz and then in Oruro, Bolivia where he graduated with top honors from the Anglo-American School. In 1950, speaking three languages, he moved to the United States and enrolled a year later at the University of California, Berkeley, earning a B.A. in Architecture (1955) while obtaining US citizenship. Switching fields there, he then earned an M.A. in English Literature (1957) and proceeded to obtain his Ph.D. at Princeton University (1961).
Victorian literature and culture and then American and British children’s literature became the foci of his research and teaching. Highly valued at the institutions where he had studied, Knoepflmacher began his career at the University of California, Berkeley as an Asst., Assoc. and Full Professor of English, before joining the faculty of the English Department at Princeton University as Professor of English in 1979. There, in 1988, he was named the William and Annie S. Paton Foundation Professor of Ancient and Modern Literature. After divorce from his first wife Cecilia Mann-Smith, mother of his first three children, he and Linda M. Shires married and had a child.
Uli was the author of six books, co-editor of four, and editor of two. He authored over a hundred scholarly essays, some collected in Victorians Reading the Romantics (2016). He was known especially for his still cited scholarly work on Mary Shelley, George Eliot, Emily Brontë, George MacDonald, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Rudyard Kipling, and Maurice Sendak. He is also recognized for being among the first senior faculty members in the United States to teach undergraduate courses dedicated to children’s literature and to help make it a scholarly field of study. Moreover, his work in children’s literature helped attract the distinguished Cotsen Collection of Children’s books to Firestone Library, Princeton University, an international research center and a resource for local children. Between 1989 and 2011 Uli served on Executive Committees of the Modern Language Association’s Divisions of Prose Fiction, Victorian Literature, and Children’s Literature and on the editorial boards of The University of California Press and of major academic journals in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Children’s Literature.
Over the years, he won numerous grants for his scholarship, among which were two Guggenheim Fellowships, two National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships, two Humanities Research Fellowships from Berkeley, and one each from the Rockefeller Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Humanities Center. Upon his retirement in 2006, Uli was honored with Princeton University’s Behrman Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Humanities and the Anne Deveraux Jordan Award from the Children’s Literature Association of America for multiple contributions to the field.
Uli also won awards for his teaching and held many visiting appointments. He remained a beloved mentor to thousands of students and teachers from across the United States, some of whom remained in touch for decades and others of whom renewed connections in recent years, after decades, to thank him again. His memorable teaching style mixed brilliant close analyses, detailed knowledge of differing histories and cultures, self-illustrated handouts, a devotion to theories of literature such as feminism and gender studies, and a hilarious acting out of literary scenes and turns of language. With such a mixture of modes, he entertained, inspired, and educated at the same time.
As well as a writer, he was an artist. In later years, while publishing his self-illustrated children’s picture book Franny, Randy, and the Over-the-edge Cat Person, he wrote poetry, self-illustrated more children’s stories, and drafted a memoir. In 2021, he was recorded online in an interview by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. about his family and his life on three continents.
An avid swimmer and music lover he was a former member of the Broadmead Swim Club and a local concertgoer. A lifelong defender and protector of all people, the natural world, and animals, Uli was happily devoted over the last fifty years to his six pet cats, who entered his life in Princeton at different times. Given his care and respect for all other beings, demonstrated daily, it is perhaps no surprise that each of Uli’s four children entered professions of healthcare, physical or mental, with local, state, national, or global emphases. Uli is survived by his inseparable partner of over forty-five years Linda, his compassionate children Julie, Paul, Daniel, and Alex, his caring son-in-law Jay Drillings, his empathetic daughters-in-law Liddy Leitman and Amy Veltman, and by his seven devoted grandchildren: Jared, Matthew, and Hannah Drillings and Nora, Ivan, Lucy, and Eli Knoepflmacher. His memory and his teachings will live on in the minds and hearts of all who knew and loved him.
He was a member of the Conservative Minyan at the Center for Jewish Life at Princeton University for twenty-five years until he could no longer attend.
Funeral services are Sunday, September 6 at 10:30 am at Orland’s Ewing Memorial Chapel, 1534 Pennington Road, Ewing, NJ. Burial is private and will follow in Princeton Cemetery.
In lieu of flowers, contributions in his memory may be made to TASK Trenton Area Soup Kitchen (trentonsoupkitchen.org) or Greenpoint Cats, Brooklyn (greenpointcats.org)