Franks named 2010 Hawkins Award Winner at APSU

Dr. Jill Franks, professor of English, was named the recipient of Austin Peay State University’s prestigious Richard M. Hawkins Award during a ceremony last month. The award is presented every spring in recognition of exceptional scholarly and creative work produced by a faculty member.

Franks, one of the leading scholars of 20^th century British and Irish studies, joined the APSU faculty in 1996 and has since published numerous articles, biographical and critical essays and reviews in highly regarded journals and books.

She recently served as the president of the D.H. Lawrence Society of North America and is associate editor of the prestigious D.H. Lawrence Review. Her position with this organization helped APSU’s Woodward Library become the recipient of the late Dr. James Cowan’s extensive D.H. Lawrence Collection.

 The Lawrence Collection includes 18 book boxes, containing originals, Cambridge editions, and biographical and scholarly works. Many of the items are now shelved in the library, providing APSU students with unprecedented access to original works by and about one of the 20^th century’s leading writers.

Franks has also written introductions for a 2004 edition of Lawrence’s “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” and a 1999 edition of Lawrence’s “Sea and Sardinia.”

In 2006, McFarland and Co. published her book “Islands and the Modernists,” a groundbreaking scholarly work that examines how pioneers in the fields of anthropology, literature, painting and evolution used islands as real and metaphorical laboratories. With her near native fluency of Italian, she’s also translated into English critical texts on Lawrence and the poet Thom Gunn.

For more information on the Hawkins Award, contact Charles Booth with the APSU Office of Marketing and Public Relations at (931) 221-7597.