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When I last saw Thomas R. Metcalf (around May 2022), we sat down to lunch with Barbara in a café in Berkeley. He was antsy. Before the food came, he wanted to discuss a recently published book in British imperial history. He had spent several weeks poring through the thousand-page volume, taking notes, and following the footnotes.

He was annoyed, the author had missed some important facts, they had cited poorly, and they didn’t know much about India. I didn’t dare to admit that I had not read the book as closely as he had. I remember how much he loved an argument, trusting that we had all done our homework.

For those of us fortunate to be taught by Tom, we know how much he demanded: rigour, clarity in writing, careful argumentation, and a requirement that we could never overstate the evidence we had. If you handed in a poorly written draft, he said, “This is terrible!” If you said something in a seminar that didn’t quite make sense, he was known to raise his eyebrows and sigh loudly. He was allergic to jargon, once giving me a long speech about how the word “instantiate” doesn’t mean anything. He liked to provoke and be a devil’s advocate, acting as if he was never fully persuaded.

For those of us who were fortunate to be taught by Tom, he was the most loyal and fierce advocate any student could have. As Lisa Trivedi, one of my PhD cohort, said at Tom’s retirement conference in 2003, Tom was an “accidental feminist.” Even though he had been at Berkeley through the turbulent 1960s, he had not been involved in the political unrest of the decade, and the first wave of feminist consciousness-raising passed him by.

He could offend (and he often did). But when I decided not to apply for tenure-track jobs because I was pregnant, he was supportive. When I declined a job because it was too far from my husband, he agreed that commuting with a child would be exhausting. When  I was offered my dream job, he said I would be crazy to refuse it. (Men rarely refused career........

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