 | Marie Borroff |
A new endowed professorship has been established in honor of Marie Borroff, distinguished scholar, trained
musician, poet and teacher of English literature, announced President Richard
C. Levin.
T H I S
IN MEMORIAM
New endowed chair honors Marie Borroff
“Professor Marie Borroff is an outstanding scholar, teacher, poet and citizen
of this University,” said Levin. “During her long and illustrious
career at Yale, she has inspired countless students, published important books
and earned any number of academic distinctions — on several occasions as
the first woman to do so. It is a pleasure to honor her now with an endowed chair
in English that will bear her name forever.”
Borroff is the Sterling Professor Emerita in English at Yale. She earned her
undergraduate and master’s degrees at the University of Chicago before
coming to Yale for her Ph.D. in English literature and philology, which she
completed in 1956. In 1959, she became the first woman ever to teach in the Department of English
at Yale, and in 1965 was the first woman appointed to be a professor of English.
She was one of the first two women to be granted tenure in any department in
Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and in 1991 she became the first woman
ever to be named a Sterling Professor, the highest honor bestowed on Yale faculty.
In her writings and her music, Borroff has devoted herself throughout her career
to what she calls “the language of poetry and the poetry of language,” including
the sounds and rhythms of words. Her scholarly interests encompass both
late 14th-century and 20th-century poets. She has published many articles and
books, including highly respected translations of three works by the so-called
Gawain or Pearl-poet, published in the volume “Patience, Pearl and
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” (Norton, 2001). Her translations of the
remaining two Pearl-poet works, “Cleanness” and “St. Erkenwald,” will
appear in 2008.
Borroff’s 1979 book “Language and the Poet” presents a detailed
comparative study of the poetic language of Robert Frost, Marianne Moore and
Wallace Stevens. In 1963, she edited a pioneering collection of critical essays
about Stevens. She is also author of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight:
A Stylistic and Metrical Study” and a collection of critical and a collection
of critical writings titled “Traditions and Renewals: Chaucer, the Gawain-Poet
and Beyond,” both published by the Yale University Press. Her poetry, composed
over the course of 50 years, was collected into a volume published by Yale in
2002, “Stars and Other Signs.” She was honored with a festschrift
in 1995: “The Endless Knot: Essays on Old and Middle English in Honor of
Marie Borroff,” edited by M. Teresa Tavormina and R.F. Yeager. A distinguished
teacher, Borroff was one of the faculty whose lectures were videotaped for the
Yale Great Teachers Series. The Yale University Alumni Association awarded her
the Wilbur Cross Medal — the Graduate School’s highest honor — in
1996.
Borroff has held numerous administrative posts and committee memberships. She
was appointed faculty counselor to the Presidential Search Committee, 1992-1993,
charged with relaying the views of the faculty to the committee. She is a former
president of the Yale chapter of Phi Beta Kappa.
The first faculty member to hold the Marie Borroff Professor of English will
be named at a later date. The donor of the endowment wishes to remain anonymous.
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