Acclaimed Scholar. Born in Cleveland, OH, Raymond T. McNally distinguished himself as an outstanding student at St. Ignatius High School, winning an academic scholarship to Fordham University where he graduated Summa Cum Laude in 1953. Attending Berlin Free University on a Fulbright scholarship, McNally would earn his doctorate in 1956 with his dissertation on the image of Russia in French journalism during the early part of the nineteenth century. In 1958, McNally accepted a faculty appointment at Boston College, where he would teach for over forty years, founding that institution’s Russian and East European Center in 1964 and co-founding the Balkan Studies Institute in 1995. As a scholar, he acquired a reputation as one of the leading American historians of Russian intellectualism, publishing several books on liberal thinker Peter Chaadayev, as well as compiling a complete translation of Chaadayev’s works into English. In the early 1970s, McNally collaborated with his Boston College colleague Radu Florescu on a popular biography of fifteenth-century Wallacian Prince Vlad Dracula, a sociopathic tyrant who had provided the name for Bram Stoker’s vampire. The resulting book, “In Search of Dracula”, sparked a wave of interest in the historical figure and engendered a re-creation of the character in the popular mindset; after McNally and Florescu’s work, almost all books and films using the Count Dracula character would attempt to tie the character to his historical antecedent. McNally and Florescu’s work, which would grow to include two more scholarly biographies of Dracula (1974’s “Dracula: A Biography of Vlad the Impaler, 1431–76” and “Dracula: Prince of Many Faces”, published in 1989) came under fire from both Balkan historians, who decried their books as sensationalistic and presumptive, and literary scholars, who would contend (with substantial justification and McNally’s public acquiescence) that Stoker knew almost nothing of the historical Dracula and had only borrowed the name. Nevertheless, McNally’s popular work continues to inspire interest in Balkan history, and he was well-respected by the many doctoral students he mentored at Boston College. In addition to his work as a scholar and author, McNally made great contributions to public service. He was an outspoken opponent of both United States involvement in Vietnam and the military dictatorship in Greece, and served for many years on the Brookline, Massachusetts School Committee and on the Democratic State Committee of Massachusetts. In his later years, McNally struggled valiantly against liver cancer, finishing a book of popular scholarship on “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” after having surgery for the disease. He would finally succumb to liver failure in 2002, leaving behind a legion of adoring fans and respectful colleagues and students.