Obituaries

Karen Ruth Daubert, university administrator, social-sustainability advocate, and literary scholar, died on Sept 12, 2024, in St. Louis, MO. She was taken unexpectedly by an aggressive cancer.

Karen was born in Tulsa, OK, on June 4, 1961. She graduated from Memorial High School in 1979 before receiving her B.A. from Oklahoma City University in 1983, her M.A. in Germanic Languages and Literatures from Duke in 1990, and her Ph.D. in Germanic Languages and Literatures from Princeton in 1998.

After Princeton, Karen served in public affairs at Washington University in St. Louis while maintaining a life of independent study. She made her mark as a thoughtful problem solver and fair-minded colleague of diverse abilities as she rose to the position of Assistant Vice Chancellor for Administration and Strategic Partnerships. She dedicated herself to creating an efficient workplace that was respectful and supportive of all, and embracing of difference, while keeping an eye toward the university's impact in the global marketplace.

As leader of the university's product licensing program, she represented WashU on the Board of Directors of the Fair Labor Association for 15 years, at various times also serving as a chairperson of the FLA's manufacturing committee, university caucus, and best-practices working group. While this work often took her to Washington, DC or overseas for meetings and factory visits, at home she worked diligently and creatively with university departments and local suppliers to ensure that university-branded merchandise would be manufactured in fair and safe workplaces.

Throughout her mature personal and professional life, Karen displayed a notably calm, kind, and unassuming manner punctuated by episodes of unexpected assertiveness, intense acuity, and surprising displays of strength--these extraordinary moments coming when a colleague or family member's personal welfare was immediately at stake, an organization's credibility was on the line, or a foundational principle was about to be transgressed. These contrasting sides of her character were quietly honed through years of study of point-of-view, candid self-assessment, and a practical commitment to the protection of others and their environment through consensus and collaboration.

She was known among friends, colleagues, and family as a thinker with an artistic spirit. She enjoyed music and art, long walks with her husband and their dogs, swimming, intimate conversation, and hand-written correspondences. Close reading, language, and literature by women were dear to her heart, though her work tended to build philosophical connections that dispersed categories of literary scholarship. She contributed studies to several literary publications, progressively focusing on literary collaboration.

Karen is survived by her husband of 35 years, Bill Hubbard; her mother, E. Dorothea Daubert; sisters Marilyn McCulloch (husband John) and Carol Daubert (partner Penny Reiger).