From Roisin Cossar

Shona in Florence

Shona was my great friend, my work partner, and a source of support and love to my family, too. We'd been spending the year in Florence, at the Villa I Tatti, working on projects that intersected in several ways. Over the years of our friendship, we talked about the possibility of coming here, but neither of us ever managed we'd actually manage it, let alone in the same year!

I'll have so many memories of her, and I'll have other chances to share those, here and elsewhere, but today I was thinking about how she and my ten-year-old daughter would walk together through the Uffizi, looking rather irreverently at renditions of the Madonna and Christ child. They'd stop in front of a Botticelli, or a Filippo Lippi, or (maybe worst) Lucas Cranach, and critique the artists' renderings of baby heads, baby legs, and baby eyes. I will NEVER be able to go to the Uffizi again without hearing them giggling about the "creepy babies."

Roisin Cossar

From Linda Mitchell

Shona's Laugh

It was impossible not to be instantly lifted in spirits when Shona laughed.  I loved that giggle that would grow to a guffaw; Shona trying to talk while laughing; the tears that usually resulted.  I have been privileged to be around Shona when we both, tired and fully conscious of the absurdity of the situation, have become overcome with laughter.  And I am proud that I could escalate it to the point where Shona would be as paralytic as I--completely flattened by laughter.

I will never forget that sound and I will miss it terribly.

From Trevor Dean

I had never met Shona, but we had had email contact, as we shared a research interest in late-medieval Bologna.  I had read and admired her work, so I was very sorry to hear that her life and career had been cut short.

From Michael Senturia

I am saddened to learn of the unexpected death of Shona, one of our children's constant companions growing up. Even as a child, Shona was an articulate, independent and utterly charming person. I know Jim and Celia and Maggi are heartbroken.  I am so sorry.

Michael Senturia

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.