From Gary L. Ebersole Chair, Department of History, UMKC

May 7, 2012

Members of the College of Arts & Sciences,

It is with great sadness that I write to report that Shona Kelly Wray, Associate Professor of History, passed away yesterday in Florence, Italy. Shona suffered a massive aneurism, which led to cardiac arrest and severe brain damage. She was in a coma on life support until her husband, Randy, her son, Shane, daughter, Alina, and her sister, Maggi, reached her side. Generous to the very end, Shona had requested that her organs be donated.

Shona was a brilliant scholar-teacher, beloved by her colleagues and students. A student of medieval and Renaissance Italy, medieval feminist scholarship, medical history, and more, Shona was one of the brightest lights of her generation. She had received to two most prestigious honors in her field—the Rome Prize and a Harvard I Tatti Fellowship. Shona was in Florence at the I Tatti Villa during AY 2011-2012 doing research for what promised to be a ground-breaking social history of the family lives of the faculty of the University of Bologna in the medieval ages. Her social history of the Black Death in Bologna will long remain a model of archival scholarship.