Skip to content

Tributes for Alastair Hargreaves (February 2011)

This file collects the in-universe tribute messages, forum posts, and personal recollections shared in the days following Alastair Graham Hargreaves’s February 2011 fall and hospitalization at Harvard University. The content is drawn from Harvard student forums, an Oxford alumni Facebook thread, theatre-community discussion boards, and in-person tributes left at the English House. It is preserved here as an in-universe artifact rather than embedded in the event-synthesis file, where it would interrupt the encyclopedic register.

Harvard Student Forum Thread

Thread title: “Professor Hargreaves – Updates?”

Students who had been in Alastair’s seminars and lecture courses posted recollections of his teaching style. Representative messages included:

  • “He’s the only professor I’ve ever had who started class by asking us how our bodies and brains were feeling. Like. Not even just a ‘how are you.’ He meant it.”
  • “Remember when he told us that he named his daughters after literary characters and someone asked if that was pretentious. And he just said, completely serious, ‘No, it’s hope.’”
  • “I didn’t think one professor could shift the way I saw literature. Or disability. Or grief. I want him to know what he’s done here—what he’s still doing. Even now.”

A separate student post, left on the English House lobby wall along with sticky notes containing lecture quotes, read: “Still owe you my essay… just waiting for you to rise from the literary grave and smite me with your red pen.”

Oxford Alumni Facebook Thread

Thread started by Isobel Tremayne (Balliol ‘96), who learned of the hospitalization through Harvard channels and shared the news with Alastair’s former Oxford students. The thread drew tributes from alumni dating back to the mid-1990s teaching years.

  • James R. Llewelyn (Balliol ‘00): “He handed back my final paper on King Lear and told me, ‘You’ve finally stopped hiding behind the cleverness.’ I’ve never forgotten it.”
  • Fiona Cross (St Hugh’s ‘98): “Dr. Hargreaves was the first person who made me feel like I belonged at Oxford. I was a state-school kid who had never read Woolf before my first tutorial, and he didn’t scoff. He just gave me To the Lighthouse and said, ‘Start with the sea.’”
  • Patrick Doyle (Corpus ‘99): “He came to my dad’s funeral. I didn’t invite him. He just… came. He said, ‘You don’t need to be clever today. Just be loved.’”
  • Oliver Greene (Magdalen ‘97): “He came to my wedding. Wore the same corduroy jacket he wore to lecture The Canterbury Tales. My mum said he had the kindest eyes of any man she’d ever met.”

Theatre Community Messages

Miriam Callahan, a RADA classmate of Siobhan Hargreaves, called Siobhan during the hospitalization to relay that the RADA Facebook page, BroadwayWorld forums, and West End forums had filled with messages of support. Several theatre-community contacts also reached out directly.

  • Miriam Callahan (RADA ‘96), in her phone call to Siobhan: “Everyone’s talking about it. You should see the threads. RADA’s page is flooded. BroadwayWorld, too. Someone posted about it in the West End forums. They’re all sending you love. Cards, flowers, prayers. You and your husband.”
  • Alfonso Reyes (West End, Les Misérables Company ‘07): “We’re all pulling for her family.”
  • Tamika Owens (RADA ‘95): “I was there when they started dating. He came to The Seagull and cried so hard during Act 4 that we heard it from the wings. He sent flowers to the entire cast the next day.”

In-Person Tributes at Harvard

The English House lobby and the door of Alastair’s office became the gathering point for Harvard students wanting to express support. Within forty-eight hours of the fall:

  • Cards left on the office door accumulated until the door was fully papered over.
  • Banners reading “We miss you, Professor Hargreaves” and “Come back soon!” appeared in the English House corridors.
  • Students covered the English House lobby windows with sticky notes containing lecture quotes, inside jokes from his courses, and expressions of gratitude.
  • One student left a box of dairy-free chocolate biscuits—Alastair’s known favorite—outside the door.

The Harvard English Department secretary collected the cards and messages for delivery to Mount Auburn Hospital in batches, and the department sent an official email to students enrolled in Alastair’s courses, canceling classes for the week and asking for privacy while acknowledging the concern and care students were showing.

Worldbuilding Artifacts In-Universe Documents Social Media Artifacts 2011 Events Alastair Hargreaves Hargreaves Family