Contact: Sasha Steinberg

STARKVILLE, Miss.—One retired and one current Mississippi State faculty member recently visited the University of Oxford’s Rhodes House in England and its new leader.

MSU William L. Giles Distinguished Professor Emerita of English Nancy D. Hargrove and MSU Judy and Bobby Shackouls Honors College Dean Chris Snyder met with Elizabeth Kiss, named warden of the research center in 2018. Headquarters of the Rhodes Scholarship system and Rhodes Trust, it was built as a memorial to Cecil Rhodes, a University of Oxford alumnus and benefactor, and scholarship creator. Mississippi State alumnus Donald “Field” Brown of Vicksburg was MSU’s most recent Rhodes recipient in 2013, and the university has had many Rhodes finalists.

Also founding director of Duke University’s Kenan Institute for Ethics, Kiss has a longstanding career in academia. Her focus has been on moral and political philosophy, and she has published on moral education, human rights, ethnic conflict and nationalism, feminist theory and transitional justice. She was Davidson College’s first female Rhodes Scholar and graduated magna cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy. She went on to receive bachelor’s and doctoral degrees in philosophy from the University of Oxford.

She previously served for 12 years as president of Agnes Scott College, a Decatur, Georgia, institution where Hargrove earned a bachelor’s degree with a double major in English and French.
Kiss maintains her connection to the Rhodes community, having mentored applicants for more than 25 years and served for 22 years on Rhodes selection committees, including six years as State Secretary in North Carolina.

Snyder, who also serves as a professor of European history in the MSU College of Arts and Sciences’ Department of History, presented Kiss with a copy of his newest book, “Gatsby’s Oxford—Scott, Zelda, and the Jazz Age Invasion of Britain: 1904-1929” (Pegasus Books, April 2019). Hargrove has created an MSU endowment to generate support for honors students participating in the Shackouls Summer Study program at the University of Oxford. Snyder has lectured students in this program since 2007.

For more on MSU’s Department of English, visit www.english.msstate.edu; Shackouls Honors College, www.honors.msstate.edu.

MSU is Mississippi’s leading university, available online at www.msstate.edu.