Marjorie Hope Nicolson (1894–1981)

Marjorie Hope Nicolson was born in Yonkers, New York. As an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, she was at first drawn to major in philosophy, but ultimately chose literature as a more hospitable field of study for women. After earning her PhD at Yale University in two years, she did postdoctoral work abroad and at Johns Hopkins, and taught at the University of Minnesota, Goucher College, and Smith College; at the latter she also served as dean of the faculty. She was the first woman to serve as the national president of the Phi Beta Kappa Association. In 1941, when she joined the Columbia University faculty, she became the first woman to be a full professor at an Ivy League university. In the course of her career, Marjorie pioneered new scholarly approaches to the study of literature and science and produced a substantial body of extraordinary work. She mentored several generations of graduate students, and championed the idea that professors had a responsibility to combine scholarship with teaching.
From 1954 to 1962, she was chair of Columbia's graduate department of English and Comparative Literature and served as president of the Modern Language Association in 1963. Her writings included the prize-winning Newton Demands the Muse (1946), The Breaking of the Circle (1950), Science and Imagination (1956), Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory (1959), and Pepys' Diary and the New Science (1965).