Cornelius Conway Felton

Cornelius Conway Felton
President of Harvard University
In office 1860–1862
Preceded by	James Walker
Succeeded by	Thomas Hill
Personal details
Born	November 6, 1807 Newbury, Massachusetts
Died	February 26, 1862 (aged 54) Chester, Pennsylvania

Cornelius Conway Felton (November 6, 1807 – February 26, 1862) was an American educator. He was regent of the Smithsonian Institution, as well as professor of Greek literature and president of Harvard University.

Five Harvard University Presidents sitting in order of when they served. L-R: Josiah Quincy III, Edward Everett, Jared Sparks, James Walker and Cornelius Conway Felton.

Felton was born in West Newbury, Massachusetts. He graduated from Harvard University in 1827, having taught school in the winter vacations of his sophomore and junior years. During his undergraduate years, he was also a member of the Hasty Pudding. After teaching in the Livingstone High School of Geneseo, New York, for two years, he became tutor at Harvard in 1829, university professor of Greek in 1832, and Eliot professor of Greek literature in 1834. In 1860 he succeeded James Walker as president of Harvard, which position he held until his death, at Chester, Pennsylvania.

He was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society in 1854.^[1]

Dr. Felton edited many classical texts. His annotations on Wolf's text of the Iliad (1833) are especially valuable. Greece, Ancient and Modern (2 vols., 1867), forty-nine lectures before the Lowell Institute, is scholarly, able and suggestive of the author's personality.

Among his miscellaneous publications are the American edition of Sir William Smith's History of Greece (1855); translations of Menzel's German Literature (1840), of Munk's Metres of the Greeks and Romans (1844), and of Guyot's Earth and Man (1849); and Familiar Letters from Europe (1865).

Felton was the brother of Samuel Morse Felton, Sr. and John B. Felton^[2] and the uncle of Samuel Morse Felton, Jr..^[3] He died of "disease of the heart" while en route to a Smithsonian meeting in Washington.^[4]

References

1. American Antiquarian Society Members Directory
2. William Bentinck-Smith (1982). The Harvard Book: Selections From Three Centuries. Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-37301-3.
3. http://americanhistory.si.edu/archives/d8170.htm
4. Appletons' annual cyclopaedia and register of important events of the year: 1862. New York: D. Appleton & Company. 1863. p. 452.

Publications

• Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society (Boston, 1866)

External links

• Biography, part of a series of Harvard's Unitarian Presidents

 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "^{article name needed}". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.