Remembering James Loehlin (1964-2023)
James Norris Loehlin was Shakespeare at Winedale Regents Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin. He was Director of the Shakespeare at Winedale programme for over two decades, during which time he shared his love of Shakespeare and theatre-making with hundreds of students, directing dozens of productions in the process.
When the Tsikinya-Chaka Centre was launched in 2021, Loehlin was one of the first scholars to accept nomination as a TCC affiliate. Students at Wits University also had the good fortune to learn from him as part of a teaching collaboration between Wits and UT. In July 2022, TCC Director Chris Thurman traveled to Texas, where he watched Loehlin and students in action at Winedale. Thurman pays tribute to this remarkable man.
I came to know James Loehlin, along with his friend and colleague Clayton Stromberger, over the course of many Zoom conversations and classes. Throughout 2020, we exchanged updates on how our respective universities were responding to the Covid pandemic and to our different national political contexts as we planned a shared course that would bring Wits and UT students together under the auspices of the Texas Global programme. In a year of gloom, I was always encouraged by James’ calm and measured reflections, by his warmth and sincerity, his generosity and good humour.
In 2021, as the South African and American students met in large and small groups online, I had the chance to observe James as a teacher. I admired and envied his ability to navigate the international and intercultural waters so deftly; to elicit ideas from hesitant students and to share his own expertise and insight subtly but clearly. He seemed to have infinite reserves of patience for tech glitches, for people who arrived in virtual classes late or unprepared, for the logistical difficulties of different time zones and curricula and timetables.
James carried all these things off with such a light touch, and such modesty, that I don’t think the Wits students ever realised he was something of a UT Austin celebrity. I didn’t quite appreciate his legendary status myself until I was lucky enough to travel to the US in 2022 to join the Winedale summer class.
James was born and raised in Austin, and it was to Austin that he returned in 1999 - after completing his graduate studies at Oxford and Stanford, followed by five years teaching in the Drama Department at Dartmouth College - to take up an Associate Professorship at UT. The following year he was handed the Winedale reins by “Doc” Ayres, who had led Shakespeare at Winedale since founding it in 1970 (James and Clayton had been among Ayres’ students at Winedale in the 1980s). Thus began the Loehlin era, during which James and his wife Laurel established their annual tradition of decamping from Austin to the Texas countryside to facilitate the intensive spring and summer programmes that inspired generations of students. James was an Austinite through and through. Apart from Shakespeare - and Chekhov, and Marlowe, and Stoppard - James’ great passion was football, and he was eager to share UT Longhorns lore with visitors (“Hook ‘em Horns!”).
Soon after I arrived at Winedale in the sweltering summer of 2022, I understood why everyone who has been a “Winedaler” found the experience formative and, indeed, transformative. It’s an immersive, intensive kind of theatrical training. It’s hard work. It’s also tremendous fun. The long hours in rehearsal are punctuated by enlivening conversations, chores, boisterous communal mealtimes, classes in costume and set design, volleyball, singing . . . the days pass according to Winedale’s unique rhythm, and the camaraderie between students builds into what will become lifelong friendships.
James was the presence who guided and sustained it all. His tall figure loping between Winedale’s buildings always seemed filled with quiet purpose, but James was not one to “bestride the narrow world like a Colossus” or lord his authority over students. On the contrary: he was the gentlest of giants. As teacher, director, coach and mentor he had a knack for finding just the right words, or just the right manner, to bring out the best in individuals and groups.
James Loehlin working with the Winedale summer class of 2022 as they rehearse for a production of Much Ado About Nothing.
James Loehlin and “Doc” Ayres on the stage of the Barn at Winedale (July 2022).
The most vivid memory from my short stay at Winedale is of James, Laurel and Clayton leading the students in song each day before they went into the dining hall. James sang one tune with particular gusto - the “Irish Dement”, a ditty composed by a group of Winedale students in the late 1990s (from the band Dog Legs & Feet) that has since become a staple of Winedale’s productions of Shakespeare’s comedies. Its jolly chorus has morbid undertones, in the best Shakespearean tradition:
With a hi hi hey and a hi hi ho
When you pass away, boys, where you gonna go?
With a hi hi ho and a hi hi hey
You're sure to be dying someday.
James didn’t seem like the kind of person who was “sure to be dying someday” - he was too full of life. Certainly, I could not have imagined then that, within fourteen months, he would be gone. Even now I find it hard to get my head around this brutal fact.
Like so many others whose lives have been enriched by time spent with James, I will take comfort in a happier image: on James’ birthday, Saturday 4 November, at 11:00 (CDT) family, friends, colleagues and former students will gather at Winedale for a memorial picnic. The event will be recorded for those who are not able to attend, and a Memorial Website has been set up for sharing tributes, poems, photographs and memories.
Read an obituary in the Austin American Statesman and a statement from the UT Austin College of Liberal Arts.