In Memoriam: Suellen Diaconoff, 1940-2020

Suellen Diaconoff, professor of French, emerita, at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, passed away earlier this year at her home in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She was 79 and suffered from heart disease.

Diaconoff was the principal investigator on a Title VI grant from the Department of Education titled “Focus on Women in Francophone Africa and the Caribbean.” From 1999 to 2001, Diaconoff led an interdisciplinary team that used the grant to redesign the curriculum so that the French major included the Francophone world in all its diversity. Professor Diaconoff was the author of Myth of the Silent Woman: Moroccan Women Writers (University of Toronto Press, 2009).

Professor Diaconoff graduated from Willamette University in Salem, Oregon. She earned a master’s degree and  a Ph.D. in French at Indiana University, concentrating on 18th-century France. She taught at Tufts, North Carolina State, and Case Western Reserve universities before joining the faculty at Colby College in 1986. She retired in 2006.