P. Adams Sitney, emeritus professor of visual arts in the Lewis Center for the Arts and one of the world’s leading experts on avant-garde film, died at home in Matunuck, Rhode Island, on June 8. He was 80 years old.
“P. Adams Sitney was inevitably the smartest person in any room he graced,” said Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon, founding chair of the Lewis Center for the Arts and the Howard G.B. Clark ’21 University Professor in the Humanities. “I use the word ‘graced’ advisedly because, in addition to having a great intellect, he was the epitome of graciousness.
Sitney joined Princeton as a lecturer in 1980, attained the rank of full professor in 1992, and transferred to emeritus status in 2016. He founded Princeton’s film studies committee and oversaw the building of a cinema — now the James M. Stewart ’32 Theater — during the renovations of 185 Nassau Street for the Program in Visual Arts.
At Princeton, Sitney taught courses in both halves of the Humanities Sequence, “Interdisciplinary Approaches to Western Culture” — from antiquity to the Middle Ages, and from the Renaissance to the 20th century. His classes spanned the humanities, with offerings in comparative literature, visual arts and philosophy, as well as a wide range of film courses: “Magic in Avant-Garde Cinema,” “The Image of Greece in European Cinema,” “Cinema From World War II to the Present” and “Major Filmmakers.”
