Died at home, 29 August, Rosanne Giuditta Potter.  Rosanne was born in Elizabeth, NJ on 4 October 1941, the only child of Harry Giuditta, a banker, and Bernice Powers Giuditta.  She graduated from Holy Trinity School in Westfield, NJ (1959), and from Rosemont College in Rosemont, PA (1963).  In May 1962, during a junior year abroad in Vienna, Austria, she suffered the loss of a leg in a streetcar accident.  Determined not to allow invalidism to change her life, after her recovery she took the MA degree at the University of Chicago (1965) and the PhD in English at the University of Texas (1975).  She taught English and Women's Studies at Iowa State University, attaining the rank of Full Professor in 1994.  In her academic career Rosanne helped to create the field of computer-assisted study of literary texts.  She edited a collection of essays in computer-assisted literary studies, Literary Computing and Literary Criticism (1989).

In retirement Rosanne divided her time between Key West and Westfield, NJ.  In Key West she was active in local institutions, serving on the Board of the Friends of the Library and supporting the South Florida Symphony Orchestra from its beginning as the Key West Symphony Orchestra.  She joined the local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, becoming its president.

In retirement also, Rosanne pursued artistic and literary interests.  She studied poetry-writing with Renee Ashley at Fairleigh Dickinson University.  She published poems in numerous chapbooks and anthologies, notably The Paterson Literary Review and The Charleston Magazine, a British publication devoted to writing about Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.  Rosanne gathered many of her poems in two collections illustrated by her own paintings: Key West: Transit of Venus (2005) and Two Arts (2022).   Early in 2025 she was invited to read them in a Key West Library series, "Cafe con Libros."  Her last work, unfinished at her death, was a memoir of her accident in Vienna and its aftermath.  Part of an earlier version of it was published in 1995 in a feminist journal, Sistersong.

In Key West Rosanne studied painting with Joe Loeber, an Abstract Expressionist painter.  Her study of painting was a return to work undertaken with Clarence Giese during her junior year in Vienna.  Rosanne painted prolifically, exhibiting at galleries in Key West, New York City, and Paris and winning awards in online competitions.  Her paintings hang in private collections in Toulouse (France), Salzburg (Austria) and Rio de Janeiro.  Many of her works can be seen on her website, "Rosanne Potter's Work."

Rosanne was married twice: in 1965 to Norman Potter, a political exile from the military government in Brazil, with whom she lived for several years in Heidelberg, Germany; and then (1984) to William McCarthy, her colleague at Iowa State University and a biographer and editor.  With Norman Potter she had a son, Anthony Miles Potter.  She was stepmother to McCarthy's two children by a previous marriage.  She is survived by her son and the writer of this obituary.