Longtime UCLA Dean Franklin P. Rolfe, 82

Franklin P. Rolfe, the veteran dean for whom UCLA’s English Department building is named, is dead at 82. He died July 26 in a convalescent home in Scituate, Mass., where he had recently moved.

Rolfe, a leading scholar of 17th-Century fiction and Victorian-era literature, joined UCLA’s embryonic English faculty in 1932, a year after he received his doctorate from Harvard. He was dean of humanities from 1947 to 1961 and then dean of the College of Letters and Sciences until his retirement in 1970.

A UCLA spokesman credited him with playing a major role in the shaping of the English Department’s doctoral program and the departments of Oriental and Slavic languages.

He had no immediate survivors.