CUTV News Radio spotlights Anne Lake Prescott

New York, NY – Anne Lake Prescott is the Helen Goodhart Altschul Professor of English emeritus and Senior Scholar at Barnard College and Columbia University where she has dedicated her career to the study of the English and French Renaissance and the exchange of ideas between the two movements. Dr. Prescott is the author of French Poets and the English Renaissance: Studies in Fame and Transformation, many articles on Renaissance literature, and ten contributions to The Spenser Encyclopedia.

Dr. Prescott’s tenure coincided with the famous Columbia University protests of 1968.

“During the protests, some students took over the president of Columbia's office and urinated in his wastebasket. The professors at Columbia were not entirely displeased,” recalls Dr. Prescott. “It wasn't a time when values were being attacked so much as shifting. A shift away from behaving one's self, as in the '50s. We were trying to be good. But what is good changed. It was a shift away from trying to seem respectable to caring more about the poor, about race, about women.”

Still, Dr. Prescott had reservations. As former president of the John Donne Society, the Edmund Spenser Society and the Sixteenth Century Society, Dr. Prescott holds a deep affection for poetry and the literary tradition.