David Lagomarsino, the Charles Hansen Professor Emeritus, died on Sept. 7. He was 80. A scholar of early modern Spain, Lagomarsino taught at Dartmouth for 45 years and won the graduating class’s award for distinguished teaching three times, matched by only one other professor in the College’s history.
“David Lagomarsino was an exceptional teacher, a serious scholar of early modern Europe, and a generous colleague to this faculty for more than four decades,” said John Carey, interim dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. “His students remember how closely he paid attention to them, in the classroom and long after they left campus, and his colleagues cherished that same generosity and care firsthand.”
Lagomarsino was born in Washington, D.C., on July 18, 1946, and spent his early years in the Acassuso neighborhood of Buenos Aires. His Argentine roots ran deep, in his love of the Spanish language, tango, and empanadas.
He went to secondary school at Atlantic College in Wales. He ran rescue missions in lifeboats, rappelled cliffs, and learned to cross the Welsh countryside with a compass and a chocolate bar. He earned his undergraduate degree from Harvard University in 1969, after a Harvard-funded summer studying the Welsh-speaking colony in Argentine Patagonia.
A traveling fellowship carried him to the University of Cambridge, where he planned to spend two years on a master’s degree and then go into business. Instead he came under the influence of the historian Sir John Elliott, who convinced him to pursue a doctorate, which he finished in three years. Lagomarsino earned his PhD in 1974 with a dissertation on Philip II, and he taught himself to read the king’s famously difficult handwriting, a skill that shaped the rest of his research.
Lagomarsino was planning to go into publishing when he saw an advertisement for a job teaching Spanish history at Dartmouth. “It was the only job in the universe designed for someone who had studied everything I had just studied,” he said. He moved to Hanover with his wife, Nancy, and their 3-year-old son, planning to stay four or five years, and stayed for the rest of his career.
By his own account, he was not ready for the classroom. “Arriving on campus in 1974 with a Cambridge University doctorate in hand, I had no clue about teaching,” he wrote years later. He learned on the job and earned tenure in 1980.
Lagomarsino won the Jerome Goldstein Award for Distinguished Teaching, then chosen each year by vote of the graduating class, in 1984, 2005, and 2013. Only one other professor in Dartmouth’s history has won it three times. He received a teaching award in 1980, now called the John M. Manley Award, and in 2005 two Dartmouth Student Assembly awards, for advising and for teaching. On his retirement in 2017, Dartmouth gave him the Robert A. Fish 1918 Memorial Prize, which honors a newly retired professor’s career in undergraduate teaching.
Students remember his command of the material and how much he enjoyed it. His survey of medieval and early modern Europe, History 3, taught them to read a primary source closely, from the Magna Carta to the writings of Charlemagne’s court. His upper-level course on Spain in the Golden Age was among his signature offerings. The course he loved best was a first-year seminar on the Spanish Armada, which he called “enormous fun to teach.” The enthusiasm never faded. “At the start of each term, every course still feels like a brand new adventure,” he wrote, “no matter how many times I’ve taught it before.”
Students returned the regard. Colleen Carroll ’13, who worked with him as a research assistant, said his teaching “possessed a miraculous storytelling quality” and that his investment in students outside the classroom was “unmatched,” whether over lunch at the Canoe Club or an email of travel tips for London. Joshua Kornberg ’13 remembered handwritten comments on his papers and emails from Lagomarsino about his writing in The Dartmouth. “I’m very lucky,” Kornberg said, “to have learned from such an outstanding man.” Professor Pamela Crossley, a colleague in the Department of History, called him "a superb colleague and an unsurpassed teacher."
His teaching reached across decades. Alumni turned up at his office door years later recalling his course and the topic of the paper they had written in it, and Lagomarsino would greet them by name. Among the former students who kept in touch were an insurance company president, a state supreme court justice, and a business school dean. Near the end of his years on the faculty, students in a course he had just finished teaching organized a reception in his honor.
Professor Emeritus of History Gene Garthwaite, a longtime colleague, said Lagomarsino would “enthrall his students with his analysis and deep, deep insights” and pushed them “to always look at the sources and to read them critically.” Inside the classroom and out, Garthwaite added, “his wit and humor were always to be cherished.”
In the fall of 1974, a first-year student named Mark Hansen ’78 was walked into his office by a senior colleague, the first person to enroll in Lagomarsino’s first seminar. Decades later, Hansen and his wife, Anne, endowed the Charles Hansen Professorship, a chair named for Mark’s father that recognizes teaching and the advancement of a liberal education. Dartmouth made Lagomarsino its first holder in 2005. “David Lagomarsino represents the best of what Dartmouth has to offer its students,” Hansen said.
Lagomarsino’s scholarship focused on Philip II and the Revolt of the Netherlands, and he edited the king’s papers on the revolt for Belgium’s Commission Royale d’Histoire. He described his subject with relish, “the 16th century Spanish king whose far-flung dominions became so vast that the sun literally never set on them.” He worked in French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, and Flemish alongside Spanish, and his research later turned to geographical information systems and the digital mapping of courtly travel. He had been an early adopter of the technology, co-developing a graphics-management program called ATLAS for the Apple Macintosh in 1986.
Lagomarsino gave Dartmouth as much in service as in scholarship. He chaired the history department, served as an associate dean and as a special counselor to the provost, co-mastered the Choate residences, and built a relational database that still tracks the academic accomplishments of the department’s faculty and students. He was also an effective fundraiser for the department’s academic enrichment funds.
“David’s colleagues past and present cannot help but respect his tremendous impact as teacher, scholar, and administrator,” said professor Robert Bonner, then chair of the Department of History, in remarks at Lagomarsino’s retirement in 2017. “He has won the affection of all of us in being a warm, principled, and good-natured friend.”
“David was a wonderful, supportive colleague always ready to give a kind word of advice and a terrific teacher beloved by students,” said Associate Professor of History Steve Ericson. “I remember toward the end of term, in one of his last years on the faculty, the students in a course he had just finished teaching organized a rousing reception for him, something I’d never seen before or have yet to see.”
Away from campus, Lagomarsino’s interests were wide-ranging. He was an inventor and an artist, a cook known for his tapas, a magician, a builder, a gardener, and a tireless traveler.
Lagomarsino is survived by his wife, Nancy; his sons, Jeremy and Peter, and their wives, Amy and Giuliana; and five grandchildren, Julia, David, Jonah, Chloe, and Leonardo.
A private memorial service and burial will be held at a later date. In lieu of flowers, the family asks that donations be made to the American Cancer Society or to the Prouty, the annual fundraising event for the Friends of Dartmouth Cancer Center. The Dartmouth flag will be lowered in Lagomarsino’s honor on Thursday, Sept. 17, and Friday, Sept. 18.