Victorian Adventurer

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A.T. Stephen Prickett: English professor, director of the Armstrong Browning Library, The Margaret Root Brown Chair for Robert Browning and Victorian Studies

Born in Sierra Leone and educated in England at Cambridge and Oxford universities, Prickett has taught on five continents in countries as diverse as Nigeria, Singapore and Australia. He is a citizen of Britain and Australia and in the summer, he returns to his home in Scotland. He's crossed the Great Victoria Desert on the back of a camel, completed a five-day trek across the Bogong High Plains (between Great Victoria Desert and New South Wales, Australia) and spent last spring break hiking through the rain forests of Costa Rica with his wife, Patricia.

Traveling is a prismatic path to discovery, says Prickett, who came to Baylor in 2003. "It was Rudyard Kipling who said, ‘What do they know of England, who only England know?' It's enormously rewarding to see yourself ™ and the world from many different perspectives and from many different angles."

A world-renowned Victorian scholar, Prickett brings his varied experiences and knowledge to bear in the library and in the Baylor classroom. He has published a novel, nine monographs, seven edited volumes and more than 80 articles on romanticism, Victorian studies, the interaction between literature and theology and other related topics. He is working on a book that explores and reclaims the value of tradition as it was experienced in the 18th century through the 20th century. Since 1991, he has been the Regius Professor Emeritus of English Language and Literature at the University of Glasgow, Scotland - a Crown-designated appointment previously held by A.C. Bradley and Sir Walter Raleigh, famous literary critics.

As director of the Armstrong Browning Library, a research center and museum built around the works and lives of British Victorian poets Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, he hopes to increase and encourage students' and the public's access to the library as an educational resource and an attractive, functional building. In many ways, he serves as a caretaker of the library's heritage and its collection of donated and purchased artifacts. But, he doesn't mind the occasional wedding photographer popping in to shoot a bride-to-be against the library's impressive marble and wood interior. He even hosted the leaders of the North American continent in spring 2005, when President George W. Bush held trilateral talks at Baylor.

"There are a lot of things going on that have nothing to do with the Brownings at all, just because it's a beautiful building," he says. "I don't object. ™ I think it's the most beautiful building in Waco."

He says his Baylor position offers him opportunity and encourages his personal interest. "Not only does it have the largest collection of books, manuscripts and memorabilia on Robert and Elizabeth Browning, but we also are expanding to become a major center of Victorian studies," he says. "Every university in the world has a history department, an English department, a physics department. Nobody else has the Armstrong Browning Library."

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