Frances Dickey

Frances Dickey
Associate Professor
211 Tate Hall
Education

Johns Hopkins University, MA and PhD

Harvard University, AB

Research and Teaching

Modernism; American Poetry; Literature and the Arts

Frances Dickey works on and teaches about modernist literature and culture, especially poetry.  Her current research focuses on how T. S. Eliot's experiences as a child in St. Louis shaped his subsequent life and work. Prelude in St. Louis: T. S. Eliot's First City will be coming out with Johns Hopkins UP in the next year. She co-edited Vol. 3 of The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: Literature, Politics, Belief, 1927-1929  and the Edinburgh Companion to T. S. Eliot and the Arts.  In The Modern Portrait Poem from Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Ezra Pound, she examines the development of poetic portraiture in connection with painting from the 1860's to the 1920's, focusing on T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams. She has also published articles on Robert Frost, Walt Whitman, Elizabeth Bishop, and T. S. Eliot. Her work on the correspondence of T. S. Eliot and Emily Hale is described in her blog and was recently featured in the BBC documentary T. S. Eliot: Into the Waste LandShe edited four volumes of the T. S. Eliot Studies Annual and served a term as the president of the International T. S. Eliot Society. She has also frequently lectured at the T. S. Eliot International Summer School in England. Check out this guided tour of her exhibit on T. S. Eliot at the World Chess Hall of Fame in St. Louis.

Awards and Honors

Distinguished Service Award, International T. S. Eliot Society, 2022

President of the International T. S. Eliot Society, 2016-18

Purple Chalk Award for Undergraduate Teaching, 2008

Andrew J. Kappell Prize in Literary Criticism from Twentieth-Century Literature, 2006

T. S. Eliot Young Scholar Award, 2003

Selected Publications
T. S. Eliot and the Color Line of St. Louis
Article

Frances Dickey, "T. S. Eliot and the Color Line of St. Louis," Modernism/modernity Print Plus Vol. 5, cycle 4, March 9, 2021

Joint Property, Divided Correspondents: The T. S. Eliot-Emily Hale Letters
Article

Frances Dickey and John Whittier-Ferguson, "Joint Property, Divided Correspondents: The T. S. Eliot-Emily Hale Letters," Modernism/modernity Print Plus, Vol. 5, cycle 4, Jan. 29, 2021.

May the Record Speak: The Correspondence of T. S. Eliot and Emily Hale
Article

Frances Dickey, "May the Record Speak: The Correspondence of T. S. Eliot and Emily Hale," Twentieth-Century Literature 66.4 (December 2020), pp. 431-462.

cover of The Edinburgh Companion to T S Eliot and the Arts
The Edinburgh Companion to T. S. Eliot and the Arts
Book

Frances Dickey and John Morgenstern, ed. University of Edinburgh Press, 2016.

cover of Complete Prose of T S Eliot vol. 3
The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, Volume 3
Book

Frances Dickey, Jennifer Formicelli and Ronald Schuchard, ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, and London:  Faber and Faber, 2015.  Online via Project Muse.

Cover of The Modern Portrait poem (book); painting by J. M. WHistler showing woman in white dress looking at her reflection in mirror
The Modern Portrait Poem from Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Ezra Pound
Book

Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012.