Biography
Jewel Spears Brooker is Professor Emerita of Literature at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida where she received awards for teaching, scholarship, and campus leadership. She has held visiting research or teaching appointments at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Oxford (Merton College), Yale, Harvard, Columbia, Cambridge, and Doshisha (Kyoto) Universities.
Dr. Brooker is the author or editor of 11 books, most recently T. S. Eliot's Dialectical Imagination (2018). Her earlier work includes Mastery and Escape: T. S. Eliot and the Dialectic of Modernism (1994) and Reading The Waste Land: Modernism and the Limits of Interpretation (1990, co-author, Joseph Bentley). She is the co-editor with Ronald Schuchard of two volumes of the critical edition of The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: Apprentice Years, 1905-1918 (2014) and Still and Still Moving, 1954-1965 (2019). Dr. Brooker edited T. S. Eliot: The Contemporary Reviews (2004), Approaches to Teaching Eliot's Poetry and Plays (1988), and Conversations with Denise Levertov (1998). She has written scores of essays on modern writers, including Eliot, Conrad, Denise Levertov, Richard Wilbur, Katherine Anne Porter, and Endo Shusaku. She has given over 100 lectures, including keynote addresses in London, Paris, Florence, Seoul, Kyoto, and Jerusalem.
Dr. Brooker has received numerous awards, including the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award from Who's Who in America and the Lifetime Achievement Award for Christianity and Literature. She has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Fulbright Foundation, Knight Foundation, and Pew Charitable Trust and has served as president of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association, the T. S. Eliot Society, the society for Christianity and Literature, and other professional organizations. Dr. Brooker served six years as a member of the National Humanities Council of the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is a member of Phi Beta Kappa.