Nearly 140 years ago, in 1886, June Rose Colby became the first woman to earn a Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of Michigan. Her dissertation was titled “Some Ethical Aspects of Later Elizabethan Tragedy, Preceded by an Examination of Aristotle’s Theory of Tragedy.”

Born June 4, 1856, in Cherry Valley, Ohio, Colby moved with her family to Ann Arbor as a teenager. Her parents valued education and saw an opportunity for their two daughters to go to college when U-M announced in 1870 that it would begin admitting women.

Colby first attended Ann Arbor High School and graduated in 1874. She then followed her older sister to Michigan. Colby described her years at U-M as transformative.

“From the time [the university] opened to women when I was 14 and knew I was to go to Michigan, it gave a settled purpose and wider outlook,” Colby wrote years later. “The work in the University was sound, hard, enlightening, creating or feeding a never-ceasing hunger for things of the mind.”

Colby earned her bachelor’s degree from U-M, then taught high school for several years and briefly attended the Harvard Annex (now called Radcliffe College) before returning to U-M to pursue a master’s, followed by a Ph.D.

Colby’s dissertation marked a U-M milestone but it also placed her among the earliest women in the U.S. to receive a Ph.D. in any field. 

After this accomplishment, Colby struggled to find work as a university professor and returned to teaching high school. Finally, in 1892, she joined the faculty of Illinois State Normal University, now known as Illinois State University.

There, she taught English literature for four decades. She also served as dean of women, became a sponsor of the university’s Sapphonian Society for young women, and was highly active in the women’s suffrage movement.

Colby retired from teaching in 1931 but continued to write and lecture until she died in the spring of 1941 at the age of 84.

— Genevieve Monsma, The University Record