[Tlc] the passing of Henry Ginsberg-T

[justinm at ucr.edu]

Dear All,

Dr. Henry Ginsberg passed away. He was a great scholar and
intellectually and personally very generous and kind. He will
be missed.

Please see below an obituary by Henry's close friend and
collageue -- Dr. Hiram Woodward.

Dear colleagues,

It is with great sadness that I report that Henry Ginsburg
died in New York City on March 29, 2007, of complications
following an aortic dissection that had occurred on March 12.
 He is survived by a brother, Carl, and a sister, Deborah
Ginsburg Ramsden.

Henry was the author of Thai Manuscript Painting (London and
Honolulu, 1989), a subject on which he was the world’s leading
authority.  Raised in New York City and in Tarrytown NY, he
served in the US Peace Corps in Thailand after his graduation
from Columbia.  Following a stay at the East-West Center, he
migrated to the School of Oriental and African Studies,
University of London, where under the guidance of Stuart
Simmonds he wrote a dissertation on the Thai derivations of
the Indian Pancatantra (see “The Thai Tales of Nang Tantrai
and the Pisaca Tales,” Journal of the Siam Society, July
1975).  He subsequently became Curator of the Thai and
Cambodian Collections at the British Library, and London
became his permanent home, broken only for a period in the
mid-1970s during which he also taught at the University of
California, Berkeley.

As someone who took deep joy in the arts (his father had been
a well-known dealer in American antiques, his mother, in
textiles), Henry was the ideal person to expand and to
research the library’s holdings of illustrated manuscripts.  A
second important book appeared in 2000: Thai Art and Culture:
Historic Manuscripts from Western Collections.  This
publication included many manuscripts in other collections, in
addition to ones in the British Library.  At the time of his
death, Henry was at work on a book concerning Thai banner
painting.

This death, at the age of 66, comes as shock.  A man of deep
sympathies and wide-ranging talents (he was an accomplished
pianist and harpsichordist), Henry lived in many worlds and
had countless friends in all of them.

Hiram Woodward

______________
Dr. Justin McDaniel
Dept. of Religious Studies
2617 Humanities Building
University of California, Riverside
Riverside, CA 92521
951-827-4530
justinm at ucr.edu