The author at age 2 with her father. Photo courtesy of the Prochaska family
My Dad looked the same for the 38 years I knew him: tall and lanky, with a full gray beard and a curly ring of hair on his partially bald head, which he covered with a black hat when he left the house. This hat was emblematic of him. It resembled an Astrakhan in style but was made of wool, not fur. Bought in Algeria during his dissertation fieldwork, it had local tailoring accents with hints of a fez, though it was not a traditional one. I’ve never seen a hat like it anywhere in the world—totally unique, understated, yet tasteful. It suited him perfectly.
My Dad lived his feminism, challenging me to stand on my own while ensuring I had the tools to succeed. It’s hard to untangle how much of who I am was shaped by who my Dad was. I honor the importance of collective history and cultural context because of him. I also inherited my existential anxiety and superpower of deep focus (alongside time blindness) from him.
Small, personal memories linger—of him mixing a strange mash of shredded wheat, yogurt, fruit, and protein powder for breakfast, and then with his tea in one hand and bowl in the other, trucking off to his study to disappear for hours ruminating, writing, and reading. He loved melty ice cream but hated doing dishes, so he ate straight from the container and only nibbled around the edges. We could always tell when Dad had been at the ice cream (he loved spumoni, but chocolate disappeared just as quickly).
There are also more adult and professional memories. My Dad was an impressive academic with razor-sharp recall. He could rattle off facts, dates, and citations rapid-fire in debates, making complex webs of information clear in real time, no matter the audience.
Interested in image archives and blessed with a totalizing encyclopedic gaze, my Dad’s work focused on the production of political violence, borders, gender, audience, and hybridity. He studied colonial photography and visual culture, driven by a profound curiosity about the historical and cultural contexts of visual art in colonial settings. In his 2003 work on Renoir in Algeria, while others analyzed the subjects depicted, he focused on what was not in the paintings, and explored the reasons for their absence.
He had an antiestablishment analytical eye and was fascinated by what others labeled “junk.” In the 1980s, he was one of the first to take historical postcards seriously as primary sources. What began as straightforward documentation evolved into analyses of postcards as visual objects with their own problematics. At a time when postcards were not yet regarded as legitimate objects for art-historical inquiry, he proposed a postcard museum exhibition (in 2000). It was originally rejected, but he persisted, and organized the exhibition Beyond East and West: Seven Transnational Artists in 2004. He further expanded his exploration of postcards as objects of visual culture in the book chapter “Telling Photos” (2008) and and the edited volume Postcards (2010).
His work engaged with Edward Said’s Orientalism and postcolonial theory: he identified comparable discursive “othering” practices in his article “Disappearing Iraqis” (1992); in writings on the local controversy over the University of Illinois’s racist sports mascot Chief Illiniwek (2001, 2010); and in presentations on social media images during the Arab Spring (2011).
He taught me about Foucaultian discourse analysis, Franz Fanon’s concept of the meeting between two worlds, Joan Scott’s theory gender as a historical category of analysis, Natalie Zemon Davis’s focus on marginalized groups, Aimé Césaire’s discourse on colonialism, the roots of modern Zionism as the Arab-Israeli land ownership conflict, and the indigenous Berbers’ resistance in Algeria, burning Annaba’s cork oak forests in protest against French settler-colonial land privatization. The list goes on and on. He shared E. P. Thompson’s belief that historians must tell the history of the oppressed and use it to illuminate and challenge injustice. My father didn’t suffer fools: he was deeply countercultural and unafraid to challenge the mainstream.
My father was a scholar-activist dedicated to social justice and human rights, using scholarship and public media to promote change at both national and local levels. He served on the editorial collective of the Public i, and wrote 30 articles in its pages between 2003 and 2019, offering critical counternarratives on local issues such as the Chief Illiniwek mascot controversy, the News-Gazette’s biased coverage, the University of Illinois faculty union, Steven Salaita’s wrongful firing, Carle Hospital’s controversial tax exemption, Illinois’s corrupt budgeting, civil liberties challenges, and more.
Historians often spot political and cultural shifts before most people, drawing on past patterns and lessons we’ve failed to learn. Eerily, my Dad’s predictions, which I dismissed as a child, have all come true. His last one was about the rise of fascism in the US, which he saw emerging as anti-terrorism measures expanded state powers, echoing McCarthy-era witch hunts. I remember his fear and anger when corporations gained personhood, when the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision started unraveling our participatory democracy, and when the Bush Doctrine helped re-elect “dub-yuh.” I have many memories of significant political moments he saw as paradigm shifts—shifts dishonoring human life and limiting personal freedoms.
David at Natalie’s wedding in Delhi, India in 2018
I remember one night in high school, when my Dad, visibly upset, sat me down and apologized for the world my brothers and I were inheriting. He apologized for his entire generation, as though he carried the weight of those collective decisions on his shoulders. This sense of responsibility, of ownership, is rare. As an adult, I now know even better how rare.
My Dad cared deeply for his country, and he believed its liberal democratic values were worth fighting for. He was uneasy about the direction our politics took in the latter part of his life. In his own words: “I never thought I would live to see the US turn into the illiberal, authoritarian, populist, white-nationalist country it has already increasingly become in early 2019. The manipulation of working- and lower-class discontent through right-wing media, combined with gerrymandering and voter suppression, and Republican anti-democratic legislation to thwart election outcomes—all these have contributed to the end of liberal democracy as I knew it growing up.”
My Dad’s handwritten annotations in books he gave me, once as frustrating to decipher as a doctor’s scrawl, are now precious. I miss his belly laugh, his ironic side-smile, and the amused sparkle in his eyes. I miss hearing him rant about biased news-rag coverage in the News-Gazette. I miss watching his peaceful contemplation, whether in an Adirondack chair in our backyard or perched on the side of a mountain—wondering what he was ruminating about until I became impatient enough to interrupt his solitude and ask.
It is an honor and a privilege to be his daughter. I carry his nonconformist spirit and his lessons with me every day, and I always will.
David at Natalie’s wedding in Delhi, India in 2018
Natalie Prochaska, PhD., is a scholar-practitioner and expert in affordable housing and economic justice. A CU native and dedicated advocate for equitable development and financial inclusion, she currently resides in Las Vegas. As the Director of Business Intelligence for Nevada’s leading affordable housing provider, she is passionate about leveraging data to support community-driven solutions to the housing crisis.
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