Robert Seton | |
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| Born | August 28, 1839 Pisa, Italy |
| Died | March 22, 1927 (aged 87) Morristown, New Jersey, U.S. |
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| Occupation | Clergyman |
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Robert Seton (August 28, 1839 – March 22, 1927) was a descendant of the New York "aristocratic" Seton and Bayley families, Seton was also a monsignor in the Roman Catholic Church and titular archbishop of Heliopolis.
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100 years of the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES)
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The UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies is arguably the most important institution of its kind in the world. It celebrates this year its centenary. Everyone is a specialist in the region. Everyone is exceptionally well-travelled in the region. Given that we are studying one particular part of the word, and given that we often sort of focus on specific social issues, it's sort of quite clear that you can’t study these issues from one single disciplinary perspective. The world out there isn't neatly divided into different disciplines. One of the good things about studying at SSEES is that people are not only a part of UCL, which can be sometimes really big, but they also belong to a small community. One-on-one, the smaller classes we were in with some of the professors that I worked with, they made a a big impression on me because they were very learned people, they were kind of good people, you know they wanted to share their knowledge, and it's those kind of smaller groups, those classrooms where you’re working with individual professors and how that affects you as a person. My day-to-day life is spent with the history staff, with fellow history PhDs, but you come into contact with a whole range of people who are doing different disciplines, so they’re doing literature, they’re doing economics, they’re doing modern foreign policy. SSEES has a very, very important element to it, which is its area focus, which goes hand-in-hand with its interdisciplinarity. Just being surrounded by these people talking about ideas, it really broadens your mind and my research is quite interdisciplinary anyway, so I find it a really useful stimulus just to make me think in other directions, and I really don't think that I would have got that if I’d just been in the history department at another university. Over the course of time my research shifted quite significantly away from international relations and looks much more at sort of migration, sexuality and health, and this wasn't the result of my attending seminars and lectures at SSEES, or at least not only due to that, but it was sort of talking to colleagues in the corridors or over a coffee in the senior common room, asking what they were working on, and my interest sort of being piqued and my research therefore being sent off in unexpected directions. Here we believe that language is culture, so that’s the approach from which we teach the languages. At this point in time, we may be the only institution in the world that teaches 18 languages of the region. All the academics working at SSEES are obviously fluent in a number of these East European languages and they incorporate these language skills into their research, and that brings about very important cultural insights into whatever discipline one is engaged in doing research. The school was founded by several extraordinary individuals, among them the three most prominent are Sir Bernard Pares, Robert Seton-Watson and Tomas Garrigue Masaryk. Masaryk delivered a very important lecture in October 1915 on the fate of small nations of Europe. He later became the first president of independent Czechoslovakia. Many prominent scholars, politicians, artists, writers from the region, who were later joined by a set of extraordinary researchers from all over the world, produced a remarkable body of scholarships over these 100 years and trained a broad range of students. Among our alumni we count prime ministers, parliamentarians, functionaries of many important international organisations and many successful business people.
Biography
Robert Seton was born in Tuscany, Italy on August 28, 1839, one of nine children of William and Emily Prime Seton, seven of whom survived to adulthood.[1] He was a grandson of Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton, nephew of Mother Mary Catherine Seton, RSM, and cousin of Archbishop James Roosevelt Bayley.[2]
Robert grew up at "The Cedars", an estate in the Edenwald section of The Bronx which his grandfather, banker Nathaniel Prime had given to Robert's mother, Emily.[3] During the time of the Great Famine of Ireland, his father sent sacks of meal and flour and potatoes and barrels of apples from the estate to a relief ship loading in New York Harbor.[4]
He was educated in Mount St. Mary's College of Emmitsburg, Maryland, and in the Academia Ecclesiastica, Rome from 1857 to 1867. He was ordained to the priesthood in Rome in 1865. He received the degree of D.D. from the Sapienza.[5]
In 1866 he was raised to the rank of private chamberlain to Pope Pius IX. He was the first person from the United States that was honored with the Roman Prelatura, and was the dean of all the monsignori in the United States. He was made prothonotary apostolic in 1867, and chaplain to the Sisters of Charity of Saint Elizabeth at their motherhouse near Morristown.
In 1876, he became rector of St. Joseph's Church, Jersey City. He was a priest of the Diocese of Newark, New Jersey; he was a trustee of Seton Hall University. Seton returned to Rome in 1901 and was appointed Archbishop of the titular See of Heliopolis in Phoenicia by Pope Leo XIII in 1903.
Financial considerations forced a return to America, where the Sisters of Charity looked after him during his final years.[6] Upon his retirement in 1921, Seton returned to Convent Station. He died at the College of Saint Elizabeth in Morristown, New Jersey (now Morris Township) on March 22, 1927,[7] and is buried in Holy Sepulchre Cemetery in Newark.
Works
"Robert Seton was remembered as a fairly eccentric character who made a good deal of his family background."[6] He wrote Memoirs, Letters, and Journal of Elizabeth Seton (2 vols., New York, 1869) and Essays on Various Subjects, chiefly Roman (1882).[5] He privately published An Old Family, the Setons of Scotland and America (1899), which is a well-researched genealogy of the Seton family. He was also a frequent contributor to Roman Catholic periodicals.
References
- ^ The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography. Vol. I. James T. White & Company. 1893. p. 190. Retrieved April 8, 2021 – via Google Books.
- ^ "Robert Seton Family Papers", Hesburgh Libraries, University of Notre Dame Archives
- ^ "Seton Falls Park Highlights". New York City Department of Parks and Recreation.
- ^ Seton, Robert (1899). An Old Family: Or, The Setons of Scotland and America. Brentano's. p. 372.
- ^ a b Seton, Robert. An Old Family: Or, The Setons of Scotland and America, Brentano's, 1899, p. 355
This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain.
- ^ a b McNamara, Pat. "The Setons, the Bayleys, and the Roosevelts", McNamara's Blog, January 7, 2011
- ^ "Aged Archbishop Seton is Dead in New Jersey". Chicago Tribune. Morristown, New Jersey. March 23, 1927. p. 18. Retrieved April 8, 2021 – via Newspapers.com.
- This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Wilson, J. G.; Fiske, J., eds. (1900). . Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography. New York: D. Appleton.
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This page was last edited on 30 May 2023, at 06:54