Professor Leonard Goldstein, my teacher, colleague and friend, who has died aged 89, was a well-known character with his trademark white ponytail and black beret – whether in the British Library, where he did his research, in his Kentish town neighbourhood in north London or at political demonstrations.
Born in New York, he studied art and English literature at the universities of Iowa and Wisconsin, graduating, after the interruption of the second world war, in 1946. He went on to do an MA at the University of Washington, followed by a PhD from Brown University, in Providence, Rhode Island.
Leonard became interested in politics during the 1930s when rising unemployment during the depression led him to become politically involved. He was also strongly influenced by the Spanish civil war, which sharpened his sense of justice. It was his teacher Karl Niebyl, a German Jewish academic who had fled Nazi Germany, who introduced Leonard to the works of Marx and Engels, an experience that formed the basis of his understanding of class. After the war he joined the US Communist party.
The onset of McCarthyism meant that it became increasingly difficult for Leonard to hold a job as an academic. He had several lecturing posts but these were all short-term because of the pressure on universities not to employ anyone with communist sympathies.
Eventually, he was forced to leave the US and seek work elsewhere. In 1962 he moved to east Berlin and obtained a post teaching English literature at Potsdam University. He became professor of English literature, holding this post until his retirement in 1987. As emeritus professor, he continued to lecture at Humboldt University in Berlin.
Leonard's book The Social and Cultural Roots of Linear Perspective (1988) shows the relationship between social change and artistic innovation in Renaissance Italy. His research was multidisciplinary, ranging far beyond literature.
After the fall of the Berlin wall, Leonard settled in London. He continued his political work in the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and the Camden Stop the War Coalition, and could always be encountered at anti-war demonstrations. He never lost his New York Jewish humour and was cracking jokes right to the end. He is survived by his wife, Mary Lou, whom he married in 1947.