WKU News & Events

February 14, 2002

Paul Murphy To Receive
Warrren-Brooks Award For 2001

Bowling Green, Ky. - Paul V. Murphy, author of "The Rebuke of History: The Southern Agrarians and American Conservative Thought," will receive the 2001 Robert Penn Warren-Cleanth Brooks Award, presented by the Center for Robert Penn Warren Studies at Western Kentucky University.

Murphy is an assistant professor of history at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Mich. He has held visiting appointments at Indiana University, Butler University and Washington University in St. Louis. He has a doctorate in history from Indiana University and was a 2001 Festival Author at the 13th annual Southern Festival of Books in Tennessee.

Murphy's detailed and dispassionate analysis of the Southern Agrarians reveals how Warren and Brooks carefully developed their positions on traditional and modern American culture, said Professor Jon Eller of Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, chair of the award jury. "It presents for the first time a full critical development of the key distinctions between the individual authors," Eller said.

The Warren-Brooks Award was established in 1994 by the Center's advisory group. It is presented annually for an outstanding work of literary criticism that exemplifies the spirit, scope and integrity of the critical studies produced by Warren and Brooks.

Past recipients include Sir Frank Kermode, Ronald Schuchard, Denis Donoghue, John Hollander, Mark Royden Winchell and Lewis P. Simpson.

"The award essentially salutes the superb scholarship of Robert Penn Warren and his friend and collaborator, Cleanth Brooks," said Professor Mary Ellen Miller, WKU English professor and Warren Center coordinator.

This year's award, which includes a $1,000 prize and certificate, will be presented at the 15th annual Robert Penn Warren Symposium on April 21 at WKU.

For more information, contact Mary Ellen Miller at (270) 745-5721. More WKU news is available on the World Wide Web at www.wku.edu. If you'd like to receive WKU news via E-mail, send a message to WKUNews@wku.edu.