Irene Mary Levy was born in Mainz, Germany on September 25, 1946 and died November 21, 2010 in Columbus, Georgia. She came to the United States in 1962, graduated from Kent State University in 1969, and completed graduate school at the University of California-Davis in 1971. She was a professor of German at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California before becoming a professor of German at the University of Maryland-European Division and at Central Texas University. In 1974 she married Robert D. (Deuce) Douglass.