Odete F Glaser

Odete Eugénio de Faria Glaser passed away peacefully on January 4, surrounded by family. Odete was born in Ourém, Portugal, on April 4, 1929, to Luis Rodrigues de Faria and Maria Deolinda Eugénio de Faria. She grew up in Portugal with her brothers Manuel, José Luis and Gonçalo (who died in childhood) and studied history and philosophy at the University of Lisbon, graduating cum laude in 1955. Two years later, she married Edward Glaser, a professor of Romance Languages at Harvard University. In 1959, they moved to Ann Arbor, where her husband had accepted a tenured position at the University of Michigan.

Odete had two children: Karen, in 1963, and Sheila, in 1965. Not long after the death of her husband from cancer in 1972, Odete resumed her studies, pursuing a PhD in history at the University of Michigan, supported by a Mellon Foundation grant. As a doctoral student under the supervision of W.G.L. Randles of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, she set to work on an annotated translation of 16th-century Portuguese sources relating to the first contacts between Europeans and the inhabitants of the lower Congo at the end of the 15th century. While writing her dissertation, she also catalogued her husband’s library of some 2700 rare books on 16th- and 17th-century Spanish and Portuguese culture, which are now housed at the University of Michigan.

Throughout her life, Odete maintained a love of philosophy, especially Spinoza, whose work she reread frequently. In later years, her interests turned to Japan — its literature and art — and to gardening. She spent many happy hours in the back garden that she designed, filled with hydrangeas, dahlias, and hostas, accompanied by her Maltese and the many friends she made at the garden club. She traveled frequently to London and New York to see her daughters and to Portugal, for whose culture, art, and way of life she retained an undying affection.

She is survived by her two daughters, Karen and Sheila, and their husbands, Declan Murphy and Mark Van de Walle, her brother José Luis Faria and his wife Maria José Eugenio de Faria, as well as her nephews and nieces in the United States and Portugal.

Fond memories and expressions of sympathy may be shared at www.muehligannarbor.com for the Glaser family.