Thank You, Ricardo

Our beloved colleague Ricardo L. Ortiz had a gift for beginning even the simplest email with a burst of sunlight. No matter the season or the weather, the week always brightened a little in his hands. His exclamation points were tiny offerings of joy, as if he were sending a bit of his own optimism out into the world.

And then, almost without fail, he would close those same messages with a question mark: “Happy to hear your thoughts?” “I hope it makes sense?” That gentle tilt of punctuation was so unmistakably him. After the exuberance of the greeting—which made even an ordinary day feel worth celebrating—he would step softly, as though asking permission to enter the space of someone else’s life on tiptoe. It was his way of caring without intruding, of reaching toward others with empathy and humility.

This is how Ricardo moved through the world, and how he served our university and the wider humanities community in a variety of leadership positions for over two decades. He welcomed, rather than directed. His presence never imposed; it gathered.

With Ricardo’s heartbreaking and untimely passing last August, we have lost a brilliant scholar, an extraordinary teacher and mentor, and a passionate advocate for the humanities. I have also lost my closest collaborator and a very dear friend—a partner in dreaming, whose insights shaped every step of our Initiative.

Ricardo was the first person I would seek out to share the excitement of what Georgetown Humanities was beginning to build, to test half-formed plans, and to brainstorm new ideas. He met every one of them with that distinctive ability to make others feel seen, heard, and capable of more.

Working with Ricardo has been an extraordinary privilege. Many of this semester’s accomplishments bear his imprint; many of our future aspirations are ones we imagined together. He has left a void in our program and in our hearts that cannot be filled.

The best way we can honor Ricardo is to move forward in this unfolding intellectual journey inspired by the values he embodied and the vision he cared about so deeply: creating spaces where the humanities can illuminate what is difficult, beautiful, and urgent in our world—with many exclamation points and many question marks.

Nicoletta Pireddu