Emily Rolfe Grosholz died Saturday, May 2, at her home in State College at the age of seventy-five. She is survived by her husband, Robert R. Edwards; her sons Benjamin (Sheila Miller Edwards), Robert, and William, and her daughter Mary-Frances (Dylan Rath); her brothers Edwin Grosholz (Donna Neville) and Robert Grosholz (Cathy); and cousins, nieces, and nephews.
Emily was born in Bryn Mawr and raised in Wayne, Pennsylvania. She received her BA in Ideas and Methods from the University of Chicago and her PhD in Philosophy from Yale University. She was Edwin Erle Sparks Professor Emerita of Philosophy, English, and African American Studies at Penn State, where she taught for over forty years.
Her research and teaching interests were early modern philosophy, the philosophy of science and mathematics, W.E.B. Du Bois, and women writers, notably Simone de Beauvoir and Maxine Kumin. She was the author of a dozen books on philosophical topics. Committed to interdisciplinary research, she was a member of Penn State’s Center for Fundamental Theory, Institute for Gravitation and the Cosmos and a member of the research team on the epistemology and historical foundations of science at the University of Paris and the French Centre national de la recherche scientifique.
As a scholar, Emily held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Humboldt Foundation, and the Ville de Paris. She was a fellow at Penn State’s Institute for the Arts and Humanistic Studies, the National Humanities Center, Toronto’s Institute for the History of Philosophy and Technology, and a Life Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge. In 2017, she received the Fernando Gil International Prize for the Philosophy of Science, for Starry Reckoning: Reference and Analysis in Mathematics and Cosmology. In 2023, her students held a conference at Brooklyn College to honor her work and teaching.
Emily was a distinguished poet, essayist, translator, and woman of letters. She published seven collections of poetry as well as translations of Yves Bonnefoy; musical and artistic collaborations with Farhad Ostovani, Lucy Vines, Mirco De Stefani, Hinako Omori, and Penn State colleagues Bruce Trinkley and Julia Kasdorf; and literary essays drawn largely from The Hudson Review, for which she served as an Advisory Editor for forty years. She taught at writers conferences at Bread Loaf, Sewanee, Wesleyan, Chautauqua, West Chester, and Western Colorado. Emily had a life-long fascination with the relation of poetry and mathematics, explored in multiple books and poems. She had a deep commitment to UNICEF, for which she composed Childhood, since translated into multiple languages and musical settings.
Emily was a loving wife and devoted mother, always ready for travel and adventure. She brought her intelligence, joy, and energy to raising her children, sustaining friendships across decades and continents, and living with purpose and compassion.
A funeral service will be held on Saturday, May 9, 2026, at 1:00 p.m. at the St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, 208 W. Foster Ave., State College, PA with Father Jeffrey Packard officiating.
Emily will be laid to rest in Spring Creek Cemetery, State College.