Phi Beta Kappa visiting scholar to speak at Bates

Distinguished literary scholar Patricia Meyer Spacks will present the annual Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar Lecture at 7 p.m., Nov. 3, in Chase Hall Lounge, 56 Campus Ave. The public is invited to attend free of charge.

Spacks, Shannon Professor of English at the University of Virginia, will discuss The Logic of Self-Love: Jane Austen and ‘Frankenstein,’ an exploration of how two women in the Romantic period suggested critiques of an ethic of self-aggrandizement.

Chair of her department from 1991-97, Spacks was also professor of English at Yale University from 1979-89 and taught at Wellesley College from 1959- 79.

Her books include The Poetry of Vision (Harvard, 1967); The Female Imagination (Knopf, 1981); Imaging a Self (Harvard, 1976); The Adolescent Imagination (Basic, 1981); Gossip (Knopf, 1985); Desire and Truth: Functions of Plot in Eighteenth-Century English (University of Chicago, 1990) and Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind (University of Chicago, 1995).

Past president of the Modern Language Association, Spacks is a trustee of the National Humanities Center and chair of the board of the American Council of Learned Societies.

She formerly served on the boards of the American Association for the Advancement of the Humanities, the English Institute and the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and as a trustee of Wellesley College.

Spacks has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society and was the recipient of the Outstanding Faculty of Virginia Award in 1995. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Institute and the National Humanities Center.

Spacks received her bachelor of arts degree from Rollis College, her M.A. from Yale University, her Ph.D. from the University of Califronia, Berkeley, and an honorary doctorate of human letters from Rollins College.

The annual Visiting Scholar Lecture is sponsored by Phi Beta Kappa, the nation’s oldest and most prestigious academic honor society. The lectureship program brings some of the country’s most distinguished thinkers to college campuses for public lectures and classroom discussions.