Elizabeth French Boyd Academic Papers

Dr, Elizabeth F. Boyd, a native of New Jersey, helds degrees from Wells Collage and Columbia University. Before college, she lived for two years in Cairo, Egypt, while associated with the American University there. Following college graduation, she spent a year abroad studying at the University of Vienna and served as private secretary to Miss Berta Ruck, novelist, and Mr. Herbert Claiborne Pell.

Returning to the United States, she held the post of executive secretary of the Wells College Alumnae Association for three years. Following a year of study at Columbia University for her master's degree, she then studied at the University of Arizona and subsequently hold a variety of post including those of secretary Barnard College and Columbia, secretary to the publisher and to the advertising manager of the Saturday Review of Literature, and correspondence teacher of English for prisoners at the Now York State Women 1s Prison in Bedford Hills.

Turning to college teaching, at Briarcliff Junior College she combined instructing in English with the duties of registrar and secretary to the president. Then she joined the Douglass College faculty as English instructor, later becoming a director of students. Awarded a University Fellowship at Columbia, she returned there to pursue her doctorate. Her doctoral dissertation, Byron's Don Juan, was published in 1945 by the Rutgers University Press.

Following the awarding of her doctorate degree, Dr. Boyd taught English for one semester at Lawrence College (Appleton, Wisc.) before returning to Douglass College as an associate professor of English. During 1957 she presented a 12-week television series, "The Modern Novel", over Channel 13 on the "Report from Rutgers" program.

Dr. Boyd, who held a Rutgers Research Council Grant in 1953 to do independent research on the backgrounds of the Bloomsbury Set, had also completed on a study of two sermons on hell in Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man, and an article on "The Pattle Sisters", a chapter in the Bloomsbury Set study.

In 1957, Dr. Boyd was elected by Wells College to the New York Xi chapter of Phi Beta Kappa for her "contribution to the field of teaching as a professor of literature within the university as well as in the larger field of adult education."

Dr. Boyd's contribution to Douglass included numerous faculty committee assignments, including representation of the Humanities departments on the College Council, chairman and member of the Curriculum committee, and member of the Graduate Faculty, the Educational Policies committee, the Committee on Freshman-Sophomore Seminar, and the Special Committee to Study Students of High Quality. She served for several years as Adviser to Foreign Students and is on the Board of Trustees of the Protestant Foundation for Students at Rutgers, The State University.

A participant on an evaluation team of the Middle States Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools, Dr. Boyd was a past chairman and executive committee member of the College Conference on English in the Central Atlantic States; a member of the National Council, and the New Jersey Conference, of Teachers of English; as well as a member of the English Graduate Union of Columbia University, the Modern Language Association, and the American Association of University Professors.