Annette J. Smith, Caltech professor of literature, emerita, passed away on October 18, 2025. She was 100 years old.
Smith was born Annette J. Leblanc in Algeria on December 8, 1924, "in an 18th-century Arabian palace which had 70 rooms," Smith said in her 2010–2011 oral history interview. A fourth-generation resident of Algiers, Smith was the youngest of four siblings. Her father was a physician and on the faculty at the University of Algiers in medicine and pharmacology. Smith credits him for providing "constant intellectual dialogue" and free use of his extensive library. As a resident of colonial Algeria, Smith was educated in the French school system, which emphasized the classics. She spent 13 years studying Latin and 11 studying Greek before graduating from high school.
During World War II, Smith and her parents took refuge in Morocco. At war's end, Smith moved to Paris, where her older brother lived, and studied at the Sorbonne. In 1947, she received a BA in classics with certificates in French, Latin, Greek, and philology. Following this, she attended an institute at the Sorbonne called the School of Professors of French Abroad, after which she went to the University of Wales to teach French for two years. Having learned English while in Wales, she returned to the Sorbonne to earn an MA in English literature in 1950.
Smith spent the next summer teaching at the Alliance Française school in Paris, and it was there that she met her American husband, David Smith, who was in France studying languages on the GI Bill following his service in Japan during World War II. They were quickly married and, after a brief separation, settled in Morocco and had their first child. In 1953, they sailed for the United States intending to live in New York, but after a visit with David's mother in California, they decided to move there instead. David taught English at Fullerton Junior College while earning a PhD from the Claremont Graduate University. Meanwhile, Smith raised their three children and taught French at Scripps College and what was then Claremont Men's College (now Claremont McKenna). In 1964, she returned to France for her doctoral studies. Her dissertation was on the popular French writer and TV personality Nicole Védrès. She received her PhD in 1970.
David was hired at Caltech in 1958 as an instructor and became an assistant professor in 1960. Annette continued to teach at the Claremont colleges, where she had tenure. But in 1970, David was appointed as the Master of Student Houses and, owing to time pressures associated with that job, Annette resigned her position in Claremont and relocated to Caltech, taking a position as a lecturer in French language and literature. She joined with other instructors and staff members to demand better salaries and benefits for women working at Caltech and helped to mentor the first women to attend the Institute as undergraduates in the early 1970s.
In 1982, Annette Smith was promoted to associate professor and was given tenure after serving more than a decade as an instructor. During her time at Caltech, Smith researched and wrote Gobineau et l'histoire naturelle (Gobineau and Natural History), published in 1984. Arthur de Gobineau, a 19th-century writer, was known in his time as a poet, novelist, and memoirist recounting the time he spent as a diplomat in Persia, Greece, Brazil, and Sweden.
Smith also translated nearly the entire corpus of Aimé Césaire's poetry into English—mostly in collaboration with Clayton Eshleman, an American poet—and published it in several different volumes beginning in the early 1980s. Césaire, a poet and writer from Martinique, coined the term négritude ("blackness") to refer to a movement of Black consciousness across Africa and the diaspora, especially in Césaire's case in francophone literature.
After the death of her husband in 1990, Smith spent two years teaching at the French University of the Pacific in Papeete on the island of Tahiti, and then retired from Caltech in 1993. She is survived by three sons, Christopher, Pierre, and David, three grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren.