Roger J. Porter, 1936–2026
Scholar, food critic, and beloved Reed professor who shaped five decades of student life.
On Tuesday, March 3, 2026, Roger J. Porter, Professor Emeritus of English and Humanities, scholar, author, and food writer, who for over five decades mentored Reed students in the disciplined joys of reading, writing, and thinking, and by his example modeled the exacting art of melding the life of the mind with the pursuit of delight, died in Portland, Oregon.
Officially, we knew Roger as "Professor of English and Humanities": as teacher of humanities, and courses on drama, the novel, the literary travelogue, and various genres of "life writing." That laconic summary fails to account for the erudite scholar with an understanding of the intellectual infrastructure of so many fields: of literature, psychology, theater, art history, and gastronomy, who was driven by an eclectic curiosity and a joyous love of life. On any given day we were equally likely to find him contemplating a "great porcine passion" (as he did in one of his prize-winning restaurant reviews) as the use of litotes in Lear.
Roger came to Reed in the spirit of adventure that animated the decade of the ’60s. It took courage—and a vision—to accept a position in a college that was then hurtling toward insolvency. But in Reed, Roger saw just the right intellectual "elbow room" that would let him pursue an independent scholarly agenda that was molded by the radical idealism of the era.
Reed and the City of Portland offered a young academic the space to invent, to improvise, and create. Roger did all three. For the entire fifty-four years of his career at Reed, Roger proved, with astonishing success, that one can harmonize the super ego with the id: scholar and artist; teacher of drama and producer of theater; free spirit and exacting administrator; traveler and teacher; culinary savant and prize-winning food writer. He saw, before hipsters and Silicon Valley made it cool to "have it all," that with enough chutzpah you can have your cake and eat it too, and that, depending on your mood, you can make THAT CAKE anything from a Parisian Baba au Rhum to one of Portland’s “chocolate salamis."
In retrospect, Roger’s life manifested an astonishing thematic consistency, an unfolding pattern of recurrences—intellectual, sentimental, sensory—that gives it the feel of a literary text. The "through-line" of his love for travel, for instance, can be traced to the place of his birth, on May 24, 1936, in the "Gateway City" of Newark, New Jersey. From there he would make his way to Manhattan; Amherst College (BA 1958); Yale University (MA 1959, PhD 1967) and, eventually, a Baedeker Guide list of destinations.
His professional preoccupation with narratives of self-formation might likewise reach deep into his childhood. We can easily imagine his father, a lawyer by profession, initiating the young Roger into the existential power of narrative structure, textual evidence, and insights into the complexities of human nature, topics that would dominate his scholarship into the various forms of "self-writing." The puzzles, mysteries, and enigmas at the core of autobiography, memoir, and travelogue would exercise his critical acumen in such scholarly works as The Voice Within (Alfred A. Knopf, 1973); Self-Same Songs: Autobiographical Performances and Reflections (Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2002); and the magisterial Bureau of Missing Persons: Writing the Secret Lives of Fathers (Cornell Univ. Press, 2011). Each of these books investigates the techniques, motivations, and rhetorical functions of self-writing as both forensic probe and as technology for self-creation. In a field known for its turgid, theory-laden writing, Roger’s studies stand out for their lucid, graceful prose. And this even though he is operating with the concepts and methodologies of jargon-rich disciplines: psychoanalytic theory, new criticism, post-structuralism, and reader reception theory. In analyzing texts, he tells a terrific story, because at the heart of it, he knows that stories matter.
The thematic nodes in Roger’s life story might also include the local connection, maternally mediated, that linked him with Philip Roth, another "Jersey boy," whose mother occupied an adjacent hair dryer in the salon Mrs. Porter frequented. A fragile link, perhaps, but nevertheless one in a chain of "elective affinities" between the two "cultural Jews" (born in the same Newark hospital) that ran all the way to Roger’s last seminar, devoted to the author of Portnoy’s Complaint.
Roger’s idea of the "Ivory Tower" expanded to embrace the entire world. Every one of his courses, books, and scholarly interests found its non-academic double. A quote from one of his restaurant reviews neatly captures this "switch back" mechanism of Roger’s mind. He writes, "Like impatient readers who sneak a look at the last page of a novel, I have a tendency to scan the dessert selections on a menu before checking out anything else." Even in the tight quarters of a single sentence, Roger shuttles between the antithetical "genres" of novels and menus, aligns them, and makes us discover a "truth" about life: that stories are everywhere lurking, just waiting to be read and savored. How many tenured professors can say they’ve published not only six serious books and dozens of scholarly papers in serious academic journals, but also get food blogs cheering for them in headlines that scream, "The Return of Roger Porter!!!!"
One of Roger’s great admirers used to marvel at his extraordinary gift for formulating research projects that took him to out-of-the way places and drew him into strange and wondrous encounters. There were Woodrow Wilsons, Fulbrights, and visiting lectureships in Thessaloniki, Cairo, Paris, Hong Kong, and various universities in the United States. There were conference papers in Thailand, China (Beijing and Shanghai), the Netherlands, Corfu, British Columbia, New Zealand, Spain, Germany, Norway, England, and Mexico. Before Russians could speak openly of Vladimir Nabokov, Roger was in Soviet Moscow holding forth on the writer’s exilic self-creation in Speak Memory. He staged Miller in Cairo; taught Conrad in Hong Kong; and spoke about families and secrecy in Norway.
And even as he enlightened students and colleagues in each of these places, Roger returned to Reed from each with fresh material to teach. There was a seminar on New York prose that drew on his theater runs to the Big Apple. There was a Mellon Faculty Seminar on “Mass Culture and Modernism” that was inspired by his year at the American University of Paris, where an interdisciplinary group of colleagues grappled with Foucault and Canetti and Benjamin over Beaujolais nouveau and cassoulet. A rash of exciting new courses spread from that seminar, and from these emerged some wonderful senior theses, in the kind of intellectual chain reaction that Roger invariably triggered.
Roger’s pleasure in the text was so infectious that he created an appreciative audience even where none existed. Consider his work in the theater: Roger not only taught the foundational playwrights of Western literature; he also put them on stage. And if the stage did not exist, he created one. And if the public was too dull to appreciate the art, he found a populist pulpit—The Oregonian—from which to cultivate its taste. He directed at least eight major plays, by writers from Aeschylus to Beckett, and created magic by dint of his skillful networking and collaborative savvy. He persuaded Lee Kelly to create the ominous sets for The Libation Bearers and was the crucial catalyst in founding and/or steering not one, but three local theaters: the Portland Conservatory, the New Rose, and Artists Repertory Theatre.
Roger’s passion for good storytelling found yet another outlet, one that transformed all of Portland into his gastronomic classroom and elevated the utilitarian genre of the restaurant review into high art. For over 32 years Roger wrote about the food scene in Portland—and beyond—for Oregon Magazine, Willamette Week, The Oregonian, and even the South China Morning Post. Many of us had the pleasure of joining Roger on his "visibly invisible" visits to restaurants, where we would be assigned a particular dish on the menu so that he could interrogate every offering from the kitchen. Roger’s reviews, written with evident delight in the potent power of words to explode the sensory and cultural dimensions of a meal, somehow managed to link physiological sensation to literary allusion, provide historical context, demystify culinary protocols, invoke an art historical analogue to the plating, and culminate in a mordant meditation on manners. It is only fitting that his massive corpus of writing on food earned him the accolade of the James Beard Foundation as one of the top three restaurant critics in America.
It also led to a beautifully hybrid work, an inspired collaboration with the feminist literary critic Sandra Gilbert and food writer-chef Ruth Reichl. Eating Words: A Norton Anthology of Food Writing (W.W. Norton, 2015) appeared in the year of his retirement from Reed and masterfully blended the four key ingredients of his professional life: criticism, literature, gastronomy, and pedagogy.
There was nothing theoretical about Roger’s devotion to good eating: his culinary prowess—exacting and exotic—was legendary; his anterior insula was always in lively conversation with his prefrontal cortex. A “foodie” to the end, he asked friends to supply him with arcane flavors of gelato and “everything” bagels with sablefish, and kept up his reputation for being a genteel and entertaining host.
How many colleagues and friends and visitors to Reed had enjoyed his expansive hospitality, and digging into a Rabelaisian feast, listened to him laying out his vision for staging King Lear and explaining how Paul de Man’s theory of the “resistance” of texts factors into his scheme? During a lull in the conversation, he’d regale us with one of his many dreams—maybe the one where he’s on a plane and the plane crashes in the middle of the Gobi desert and turns into a lobster, and Roger is standing there, nothing but sand all around, wondering how he’ll ever get out of there alive, and suddenly there’s the voice of God booming, “Eat the goddam LOBSTER!” And we would all laugh and ask him what this said about his deep psyche, and off he would go, with stories about analysts and literary stars he has known. We would be inspired, and by the end of lunch, our minds would be exercised and our appetites satiated.
The memories of those convivial dinners—and of stimulating seminars and lively divisional meetings presided over by Roger, as well as the pleasures of the texts he left behind—all these will linger. And at unexpected moments, a fugitive phrase or the caramel crunch of a tarte tatin will summon him, and we will remember, with profound admiration and gratitude, Roger J. Porter, Professor of English and the Humanities.
Roger is survived by his wife and companion of 25 years, Jennifer Ash; cousins Clayton Porter Gillette (Jeri Weinstein Blum) and Marjorie Gillette Wolfe and their children and grandchildren; brother-in-law Richard Ash (Maria), sister-in-law Connie Ash (Charlie), and sister-in-law Mary Beth Ash (Todd); and dozens of devoted friends. A memorial service will be scheduled.
Tags: Obituaries, Professors, Reed History