Dalai Brenes, emeritus professor of Romance studies, died April 7 in Amherst, N.Y. He was 90.
A specialist in 16th- and 17th-century Spanish literature, he joined the faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences at Cornell in 1956 and helped build the Romance Studies Department. He retired in 1972 and was awarded the title of emeritus professor that year.
Before coming to Cornell as a graduate student at the age of 47, Brenes was chairman of the Department of Modern Foreign Languages at Chicago's Roosevelt University, which he helped found. At Roosevelt he established a department for the study of Chinese, Hindu, German, Latin American and African cultures. He received his doctorate in Romance studies at Cornell in 1956 and was appointed immediately to the faculty.
Brenes graduated from Northwestern University with a B.A. in 1936 and earned his master's in 1937 at the University of Chicago.
His love of teaching was well-known, and of his opportunity to have a career in it, he often quoted Frost: "Lucky is the man whose vocation is his avocation."
He was active on the admissions committee at Cornell for many years, before and after his retirement. Since his retirement, his chief research was on the classic Spanish work Lazarillo De Tormes.
Memorials may be made to the Cornell University Libraries.
William L. Brown Jr., professor emeritus of entomology, well known for his research into the ant world, died March 30 in Ithaca. He was 74.
Brown received his bachelor's of science degree in zoology and entomology from Pennsylvania State University in 1947 and his doctoral degree in biology from Harvard University in 1950. He served as a technician in the 36th Malaria Survey Unit of the USAAF Medical Department from 1943 to 1946.
In 1950, he received a Parker Traveling Fellowship and the first Fulbright Research Fellowship to Australia. Afterward, he returned to Harvard and the Museum of Comparative Zoology, where he stayed until he came to Cornell in 1960. Brown became an emeritus professor in 1991.
Last year, the research of entomologists Brown and E.O. Wilson of Harvard was chronicled in the book The Earth Dwellers (Simon & Schuster).
Brown was a member of the Society for Systematic Zoology, the American Entomological Society, the Kansas Entomological Society, the Cambridge Entomological Society, and in 1984 he served as president of the Society for the Study of Evolution.
A memorial service will be held May 17 at noon in Anabel Taylor Chapel, with a reception to follow in the Founders Room.