Obituary: Dr. William Mulder

Dr. William Mulder

1915 ~ 2008

Gentleman scholar, mentor, bibliophile, Mormon historian, English and American Studies professor and

advocate of Indo-American scholarship and understanding, Dr. William Mulder died at home March 12, following a stroke.

He was born June 24, 1915, in Haarlem, Holland, the son of Albertus and Foekje (Fanny) Visser Mulder, who immigrated to the

United States in 1920. After L.D.S. High School and a Holland mission (1935-37), Dr. Mulder graduated from the University of Utah in 1940 and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. While a student, he wrote for undergraduate publications, the Chronicle, Pen, and Utonian.

After service as a communications officer in the U.S. Naval Reserve on Okinawa during World War II, he returned to the U of U for his

Master's Degree in English in 1947. He pursued graduate studies at

Harvard University in an American Civilization program and was

granted a Ph.D. "with distinction" in 1955. His dissertation was published in 1957 by the University of

Minnesota Press as Homeward to Zion: The Mormon Migration from Scandinavia. In 1958, he edited, with the late A. Russell Mortensen, Among the Mormons: Historic

Accounts by Contemporary Observers, originally published by A.A. Knopf and still in print in Sam Weller's Western Epics imprint.

Dr. Mulder taught in the English Department of the U of U for 41 years, with several leaves of

absence, including a 1957 teaching Fulbright at Osmania University in Hyderabad, India. That experience led to his being asked to lecture in India for the U.S. Information