Jewel Spears Brooker is best known internationally as a scholar in modern literature, with extensive work on T. S. Eliot.
SEMINOLE, FL, February 05, 2019 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Marquis Who's Who, the world's premier publisher of biographical profiles, is proud to present Jewel Spears Brooker, Ph.D., with the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award. An accomplished listee, Dr. Brooker celebrates many years' experience in her professional network, and has been noted for achievements, leadership qualities, and the credentials and successes she has accrued in her field. As in all Marquis Who's Who biographical volumes, individuals profiled are selected on the basis of current reference value. Factors such as position, noteworthy accomplishments, visibility, and prominence in a field are all taken into account during the selection process.
Dr. Brooker is Professor Emerita of Letters at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida where she taught for 31 years. She began her career in the 1970s at the Universities of South Florida and Tampa and later held visiting appointments at Doshisha University in Kyoto, Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Colorado School of Mines in Golden, and Columbia University in New York. Since 2009, Dr. Brooker has been a professor at the T. S. Eliot International Summer School hosted by the Institute of English Studies at the University of London. She has conducted seminars at Seoul National University and, as a Fulbright Senior Specialist, at Hebrew University and at Northwest University in South Africa.
In addition to her work as a college teacher, Dr. Brooker has been a leader in the wider world of scholarly activity. She has organized and chaired a dozen international conferences, including the centennial for T. S. Eliot in St. Louis in 1988, a millennial event on Eliot in London in 1999, and an East-West conference in Beijing in 2013. She served as reviewer and project evaluator for the National Endowment for Humanities, the U.S. Department of Education, and the Florida Endowment for the Humanities. From 2003-08, Dr. Brooker was a member of the National Humanities Council of the National Endowment for the Humanities. In addition, she has served as president of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association, the T. S. Eliot Society, and the Association for Christianity and Literature.
Dr. Brooker is best known internationally as a scholar in modern literature, with extensive work on T. S. Eliot and publications on Denise Levertov, Richard Wilbur, Katherine Anne Porter, Shusaku Endo, and others. She has published ten books and more than 150 essays in journals and books. She is the author of T. S. Eliot's Dialectical Imagination (2018), Mastery and Escape (1994), and with Joseph Bentley, Reading The Waste Land (1990). She edited two volumes of The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Apprentice Years in 2014, and Still and Still Moving in 2019, and in 1988, she edited the Modern Language Association Approaches to Teaching Eliot's Poetry and Plays. In 2014, Dr. Brooker was a Research Fellow at Merton College, Oxford University, and in 2000, at the University of London. In 1999, she was the Kharl Fellow in Literary Manuscripts at Harvard University. Dr. Brooker has lectured extensively in the United States and abroad, including major addresses in London, Paris, Florence, Seoul, Kyoto, and Jerusalem. She has also lectured at the sites memorialized in Eliot's Four Quartets: Burnt Norton, East Coker, and Little Gidding in England, and Gloucester, Massachusetts in the United States.
A member of Phi Beta Kappa and listee in numerous biographical entries, Dr. Brooker was honored by Eckerd College with their "Teaching Excellence and Campus Leadership Award" in 1990, and in 2003 received the "Chapin Award for Excellence in Scholarship." She received grants for her work from the National Endowment of the Humanities, the Fulbright Foundation, and the Pew Foundation. In 2010, she received the "Distinguished Humanities Graduate Award" from the University of South Florida, and in 1994, the South Atlantic Modern Language Association Prize for distinction in scholarship. An Honorary Member of the T. S. Eliot Society, she remains active in professional organizations, including the Modern Language Association, the International Association of University Professors of English, and the Modernist Studies Association.
The daughter of Mae Johnson and William Burnside Spears, Jewel Fay Spears (Brooker) was born in Jenkins, Kentucky on June 13, 1940. In 1957, she graduated from Lafayette High School in Lexington and in 2009 was enrolled in the school "Hall of Fame." She received an Associate of Arts degree from Southeastern Christian College in Kentucky in 1959, a Bachelor of Science degree from Stetson University in Florida in 1962, a Master of Arts from the University of Florida in 1964, and a Ph.D. from the University of South Florida in 1976. She is married to Hampton Ralph Brooker, a professor of physics; she is the mother of two children, Emily Hope Brooker Langston and Mark Spears Brooker, and the grandmother of Rachael Elizabeth Langston.
In recognition of outstanding contributions to her profession and the Marquis Who's Who community, Jewel Spears Brooker, Ph.D., has been featured on the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement website. Please visit www.ltachievers.com for more information about this honor.
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