Floyd Horowitz, a retired English professor at Kansas University, died last week in New York of complications of Alzheimer’s disease. He was 84.

Horowitz joined KU in 1961 and retired in 1993.

English professor James Caruthers remembered Horowitz as “among the first of the university’s humanists to see the vast potential for computer applications to our society as a whole and to the university, the humanities in particular.”

Horowitz was a founding editor of Computer Studies, the first scholarly journal dedicated to computer use in the humanities. He was acting chairman of the department of computer science from 1972 to 1975.

“We remember him as a scholar who adeptly straddled the humanities and the sciences and as a friend to the university,” said KU Chancellor Bernadette Gray-Little.

For more than 20 years, Horowitz and his wife, Frances Degan Horowitz, have had a Hall Center for the Humanities annual lecture named in their honor: the Frances and Floyd Horowitz Lecture Series Devoted to Issues Related to Our Multi-cultural Society. Frances Horowitz is a former KU vice chancellor for research and graduate studies at KU.