Contact: Kenneth Billings
STARKVILLE, Miss.--A veteran Mississippi State English professor is receiving the 2007 South Atlantic Review Essay Prize Award for her entry titled "T.S. Eliot's Year Abroad 1910-1911: The Visual Art."
Eliot scholar Nancy Hargrove, one of the university's top Giles Distinguished Professors, will accept the honor at this weekend's [Nov. 9-11] annual convention of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association in Atlanta, Ga. She is a specialist in 20th century American and British poetry, modern drama, American literature of the 1920s, and Southern literature.
South Atlantic Review, the organization's quarterly journal, reviews articles published each year and selects one essay to recognize for exceptional scholarship and contribution to the study of modern language. The award includes a $500 honorarium.
Hargrove's entry is extracted from a chapter of a book she is writing. Titled "Un Present Parfait: T.S. Eliot and the Cultural Milieu of Paris," her latest publication will examine two years the early 20th century American writer [1888-1965] spent in Europe as a graduate student.
Hargrove, an MSU faculty member since 1970 who also holds the title of John Grisham Master Teacher, said she is "very honored to have won this prestigious award."
A North Carolina native, Hargrove received a bachelor's degree, with high honors, from Agnes Scott College, a master's from the University of Wisconsin and a doctorate from the University of South Carolina.
Over an MSU career that began following her graduation from South Carolina, Hargrove has received a host of campus, regional and national awards, including multiple selections for the prestigious Fulbright Scholars Program. In 2000, she was named Mississippi Professor of the Year by the Washington, D.C.-based Council for the Advancement and Support of Education, the nation's leading education advancement organization.
Hargrove is the author of two books, "Landscape as Symbol in the Poetry of T.S. Eliot" and "The Journey Toward Ariel: Sylvia Plath's Poetry of 1956-1959." She also has had published more than 40 scholarly essays on Eliot, Plath, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and other internationally prominent writers.
Hargrove said she was notified of the award by her former student and SAMLA executive director Lynee Lewis Gaillet, an MSU alumna who also is an associate professor of English at Georgia State University.
For more information about Mississippi State University, see http://www.msstate.edu/.