Contact: Kay Fike Jones
Nancy D. Hargrove is receiving Mississippi State University's 1999 Outstanding Humanist Award.
A Giles Distinguished Professor of English and John Grisham Master Teacher, she will receive the honor at a 3 p.m. Wednesday [Oct. 27] program in the Grisham Room of Mitchell Memorial Library.
During a multimedia presentation she will discuss influences on the work of American poet T.S. Eliot. Her lecture, titled "The Great Parade: Interdisciplinary Influences from Paris and London in the Work of T.S. Eliot," will draw from research she completed recently in London and Paris.
The Outstanding Humanist Award program is co-sponsored annually by the MSU College of Arts and Sciences and its Institute for the Humanities, as well as the Mississippi Humanities Council.
Hargrove, an MSU faculty member since 1970, specializes in 20th century United States poetry and drama, and especially in the works of Eliot and Sylvia Plath.
She is the author of two books, "Landscape as Symbol in the Poetry of T.S. Eliot" and "The Journey Towards Ariel: Sylvia Plath's Poems of 1956-59." She also has published more than 30 essays in journals and books and co-authored a CD-ROM on Eliot.
Among Hargrove's earlier honors are four Fulbright Awards, an MSU alumni teaching award, an honors program teaching award, and teaching awards from the South Atlantic Association of Departments of English. She has been named an outstanding alumna of Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Ga., where she received a bachelor's degree in 1963.
She also holds a master's from the University of Wisconsin and a doctorate from the University of South Carolina.