The Department of German and Romance Languages and Literatures shares its deep regret and sympathy upon the loss of Dr. Richard Macksey (1931-2019), for decades a guiding light in the study of languages, literature, and film at Johns Hopkins. Dr. Macksey had defended his Ph.D. thesis, written in French, in 1957 at Hopkins, where the decade following he would found the Humanities Center (now Comparative Thought and Literature). A portrait of Dick Macksey, whose commitment to humanistic thinking and to language learning was untiring, and legendary in its generosity, can be found _here_.