Michael Staveley

Professor Michael Staveley passed away at home on May 30, 2026. Born in Swanland, Yorkshire on July 21, 1940, he grew up in Howden, attending local schools, including Goole Grammar School, followed by undergraduate and graduate studies at the University of Reading where he earned Bachelor and Master of Arts degrees in Historical Geography.  He was a keen rower and member of the University of Reading team for the first broadcast of the BBC TV show “University Challenge”. During his MA years, he was elected President of the Student Union and in 1964 married fellow student Anne Stewart Leslie. In 1965, they moved to Edmonton, Alberta where Michael pursued his doctorate at the University of Alberta. Within a year, he took up an opportunity to be a Canada Council Research Fellow in the Geography Department at Memorial University of Newfoundland, working within the Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER) which supported his research into historical migration patterns in Newfoundland and Labrador.

The couple embarked on an adventurous cross-country road trip in their white Volkswagen bug, absorbing the breadth of the Canadian landscape en route to a new future. Expecting to stay only one year in Newfoundland, Michael went on to build a long and productive career at Memorial, completing his PhD in 1973, working first as a full-time lecturer in the Geography Department, and becoming Department Head in 1979. He developed specialisms in historical demography and political geography and became an expert on the Labrador Boundary Dispute, authoring, with Richard Budgell, a frequently cited 1987 article and map publication on the 1927 Privy Council decisions, The Labrador Boundary. An eloquent and erudite educator, he was known by his students to be a generous and kind professor. He imparted his deep knowledge of his field through illustrative stories, nurturing their intellectual and personal development through the books, ideas, histories, and narratives that compelled his own abiding and wide-ranging fascination with geography, geomorphology, time, place, and people.

In 1983, Michael moved into a new and deeply satisfying role as Dean of the Faculty of Arts.  During this period of major change at the University, he helped steer the institution through crucial transitions, including, with the addition of grade 12 to the high school curriculum in 1981, the necessary inclusion of legacy programs like the former junior divisions into full departmental recognition.  He advocated for and expanded the Arts faculty, spearheading and collaborating with many others on an extension of the Arts building, and in building a new state-of-the-art Music School.  He established the Dean’s awards for academic excellence in undergraduate coursework.  Later, he navigated the complex negotiations involved in faculty unionization with wisdom, a steady hand, and an astute eye for the balancing act between individual and collection vision.  Mostly, he took huge pleasure in others’ successes and bold achievements and enjoyed academic administration as crucial to expanding pathways for the achievement of those ambitions.  As he said in an exit interview with the Evening Telegram in 1993, after a decade of Decanal work and before taking a year’s sabbatical at Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge, “When you’re a Dean, you get rewards from the attainments of other people, very largely. There is satisfaction that comes from seeing faculty attain, receive degrees, write important books, and achieve research grants; another satisfaction which overlaps this is seeing students develop, learn, and grow.”   Consistent with this vision, he later worked to revive and sustain the University Faculty Club as a space for collegiality, cross-disciplinary conversations, and serendipitous discoveries.

As much as he loved institution-building, so too Michael took great pleasure in building projects of all kinds.  In 1967, he and Annette fell in love with the Lawlor farmhouse on Portugal Cove Road, built in 1892, and slated for demolition.  In what became a true labor of love, they renovated it largely themselves in the early years, Michael laying the floorboards, building walls, and making room — literally and metaphorically — for a growing family with the arrival of Victoria (1967), Alice (1970) and James (1979).  When he retired in 2005, he built with others’ help another beloved country house in Colliers, near the ocean where he had enjoyed sailing years before, leading the Royal Newfoundland Yacht Club (RNYC) as Commodore in the early 1980s. The trees, glades, and fields fed his poetic imagination, his scholarly sensibilities, and his rootedness in place as a reflection of the land and of home.

He took huge pride in his family, his children and sons-in-law, Ravi and Paul, was a tremendous protector and inspirer of their pursuits, a bulwark against their own trials and challenges, and a quiet but fervent champion of their successes.  He made countless trips to California and Oxfordshire in the last twenty years, delighting in the personalities and unique interests of his grandchildren, Benjamin (2006), Jacob (2011), and Michael (2012).  As with his students and colleagues, dear friends, and Annette, Professor of English at Memorial University and his beloved wife of 61-years, he delighted always in sharing the knowledge he gleaned from his voracious reading, his in-real-time contextualization of the shifting landscapes we live in, and his ability to listen to them as young people, to guide their growth, and to help inspire their futures.  He will be greatly missed but cherished for his legacies: his deep belief in the role of universities to nurture both the inner and outer lives of its occupants, young and old; his love of books, knowledge and learning for their own sake; his loyalty to friends and family as a testament of character; and his optimistic, cheerful, and brave hope in and for the future.

A celebration of life will be held Tuesday, August 11, 2026, 5:30-7:30pm in the Harbour View Room at The Rooms, St. John’s, NL.  For further information, please contact staveley@stanford.edu