We are profoundly sad to announce the death of our colleague Janis Greve. Janis taught and advised students in the English department at UMass Amherst for more than thirty years.
In the service-learning course she was most proud of—(Dis)ability and Literature—she had her students work with individuals with cognitive differences in making crafts and drawings, in telling and illustrating their life stories. And she exposed her students to a variety of kinds of representations of the differently abled—in graphic novels, memoirs, film, art, dance, websites, and more. Her students persistently declared that Janis’s courses expanded their minds, generated enduring insights, changed the ways they thought (especially about so-called “disability”). They characterized her courses as rewarding and engaging, standouts in their academic experience for their innovative content and form, but also for the attention and care Janis lavished on her students, and for the ways she made her classes welcoming and challenging, inclusive and stimulating, mini-communities of mutual respect, empathy, and courtesy—"one of the best courses at UMass,” “I will remember this class for the rest of my life!”
Read more about Janis's life in her obituary. We send our sincere condolences to her family.