MONMOUTH, Ill. — James Christie Shields ’49, who donated the Shields Collection of Art and Antiquities to his alma mater in 1999, died on Sept. 20, 2009, in Media, Pa.

“I truly have learned, and I have been excited,” said Shields at the time of his donation. “Now I think others can learn from these artifacts … I wanted it to go somewhere where it would have more importance and more usefulness, and Monmouth College just made more sense (than a New York museum).”

The original collection, pieced together over several decades, contained more than 600 objects from Egypt, the Mediterranean, the Near East, India, China, Japan and Southeast Asia, as well as Africa and pre-Columbian America. It recently grew by approximately 70 pieces, according to Mary Phillips, curator of college art collections.

“The works in this last bequest may be called his treasures, I believe, as these were his favorite pieces, which he kept in his own apartment, and represented acquisitions over his lifetime,” she said. “They reflect his knowledge and appreciation of many different cultures, particularly those around the Mediterranean Sea, so much a part of his life and devotion.”

Phillips said the latest pieces hold “a very special place for me. When they were given to us, I knew that Mr. Shields was leaving his cherished New York City, and that he wished his treasures to be given to and cared for by his beloved alma mater.”

The son of Presbyterian missionaries, Shields was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopa, grew up in Khartoum, Sudan, and went to school at the Schutz American School in Egypt.

His family returned to the U.S. in 1942 and, after a few years at Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts, Shields joined the U.S. Naval Reserves for the duration of World War II. He served as a hospital corpsman with the U.S. Marine Third Division in the Pacific Theater, taking part in the Iwo Jima and Okinawa campaigns and the Guam battle aftermath.

Back in the U.S. once again in 1946, Shields studied biology at Monmouth and participated in choir, Crimson Masque and Theta Chi. He earned a master’s degree from the University of Pittsburgh and also studied at Yale University for three years.

Shields was an English instructor at the University of Hawaii and Middlebury College before joining the English department of the Collegiate School in New York City in 1963. Eight years later, he was named head of the department, a position he held for the next 18 years. He retired in 1991.

Bruce Breimer, Collegiate’s college adviser, wrote, “First and foremost a teacher extraordinaire of literature and letters, Jim deserves the lion’s share of the credit for cultivating Collegiate’s widely recognized stature as a ‘writers’ school.” In 1987, Shields was one of 30 teachers named among the most outstanding in the U.S. The next year, Monmouth College conferred on him the degree of Doctor of Humane Letters.

Since his retirement, Shields studied and wrote in the field of Eqyptology. At the time of his death, several items from Monmouth’s Shields Collection were on loan to the University of Missouri for an exhibit titled “The Sacred Feminine.”