Since her graduate student days,Dr. Mechthild Cranston (Professor Emerita of Languages) has been an active professional, enjoying teaching and/or studying at universities here and abroad (Marburg, Germany; Paris, France, and Perugia, Italy). She has received NEH and/or ACLS grants to Yale, Stanford and Paris and was awarded a knighthood by the Prime Minister of France via the French Ministry of Education (Chevalier des Palmes Academiques). At Clemson, she was honored with a Provost Medal for Scholarly Achievement, the Class of 1940 D. W. Bradbury Award for Outstanding Service to the Honors College and two Board of Trustees Awards for Faculty Excellence.
Her many articles have appeared in journals like PMLA (New York), FMLS (England), RLMC (Italy), MLR (England), Les LettresFrancaises (Paris), DalhousieFrenchStudies (Canada), and Theoria (South Africa). Her major focus has been on modern French poetry (Apollinaire, Char, St John Perse) and the works of Marguerite Duras, reviewed in, e.g., The FrenchReview, WorldLiteratureToday, RomanischeForschungen (Germany), and the Carnetcritique (Paris). She has worked on literature and painting as well as poetry and music.
Her own poetry has received recognition from the American Poetry Association.
Since her retirement in 2004, Dr. Cranston has enjoyed reading and writing in Menton, France, attending concerts in Berlin, Germany, and restoring her mother’s home and garden in Berkeley, California. Springs and autumns, she writes, are most impressive in the Carolinas.