Robert Grant Irving
Dr. Irving was born in Hartford, Connecticut of Scottish-Canadian parents and was educated at Balliol College, Oxford; King's College, Cambridge; and Yale University. He holds degrees in history and the history of art and architecture. A Fellow of Berkeley College at Yale, he has taught at Yale, Wesleyan, Trinity College in Hartford, and the University of Virginia. Dr. Irving has lectured at universities and museums on six continents. He has held research grants in India, Africa, Britain, and the United States, including a Fulbright Scholarship and Fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, American Institute of Indian Studies, American Council of Learned Societies, Ernest Oppenheimer Memorial Trust, National Endowment for the Humanities, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Dr. Irving has been a lifetime advocate and activist for historic preservation.
During his studies at Yale[1] in preparation for his dissertation, Mr. Irving had been conducting research in India in 1968-69. Mr. Irving had placed all his research material in two trunks that were shipped from New Delhi to Hartford. Upon his return to Yale in 1969, he discovered that Pan American World Airways had lost his research. The airline permitted Mr. Irving to visit John F. Kennedy Airport to search through 16 acres (not 60, as stated in a news article) of unclaimed luggage. He was able to locate one trunk, but the contents had become damaged and useless because of exposure to the weather. Mr. Irving filed a successful $15,000 (not $35,000, as stated in a press article) lawsuit in order to recoup expenses accrued on his return to India to redo his entire research and photography. Discovered too late to be of use, the second trunk surfaced at a Boston airport warehouse after more than four years.
The completed dissertation became the basis for the award-winning book Indian Summer.
FROM WIKIPEDIA JULY 2016
Person TypeIndividual
Cape Verdean, 1924 - 2005