The University of California, Davis, faculty have selected women's literature scholar Sandra Gilbert, a UC Davis professor of English, as the 1996 Faculty Research Lecturer, one of the campus Academic Senate's most prestigious honors. Scholars from across the country and around the world recognize Gilbert as one of the most powerful and influential literary critics writing in America today, says Peter Marler, professor emeritus of biology and psychology, and chair of the selection committee. Gilbert is characterized by colleagues as a "bold and prolific critic" with a "vivid and explosive intelligence," Marler says. Together with her collaborator, Professor Susan Gubar of Indiana University, Gilbert has "created a profoundly influential overarching vision of the writing of women," according to her colleagues. She is co-author of what is described as "the most widely cited, mined and debated book of the last two decades in American literary criticism and has more or less created the discipline of women's studies in literature." The publication in 1979 of Gilbert and Gubar's book, "The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the 19th-Century Literary Imagination," is considered a key turning point in the field of women's studies in literature. Book critics have noted that the book "boldly reimagined an entire century of women's writing," Marler says. "Scholar after scholar has attested to the transforming power of the book -- to the 'eye-opening thrill' in the words of one, 'of finding that Victorian novels were open to so radical and cogent a rethinking,'" Marler says. In the book, Gilbert and Gubar examine how women writers created submerged meanings or meanings hidden behind the "public" content of the work, notes one reviewer. Their book was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics' Circle Award. Since that book, Gilbert and Gubar have collaborated on other works, including the three-volume "No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century," which concentrates on Modernism and the outburst of literary greatness surrounding World War I, and "The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women," which makes accessible to students and general readers the entire tradition of literature in English by women. Gilbert joined the UC Davis faculty in 1975, after having been an associate professor at Indiana University. She received her doctorate from Columbia University, her master's from New York University and her bachelor's from Cornell University. When she began teaching at UC Davis, she had already published more than 40 poems and essays, as well as the book, "Acts of Attention," a study of D.H. Lawrence's poetry. Gilbert left the campus in 1985 to take the distinguished Charles Barnwell Straut Chair of English at Princeton University, but returned to UC Davis in 1989. During her career, Gilbert has continued to publish her poems (at last count, five volumes had appeared in print), and she frequently publishes essays, either separately or in collaboration. With Gubar, she co-edited "Shakespeare's Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Writers" and "Feminism and Modernism." These works "advance our understanding of the contribution that feminist analysis makes to the field of literary studies," Marler says. Recently, Gilbert and Gubar have co-authored an irreverent look at contemporary cultural and political correctness debates in their book "Masterpiece Theatre: An Academic Melodrama." The book, written as a film script, is a "soap opera" satirizing the cultural changes within and outside academia, sending up critics, politicians, writers, pop stars, media personalities and others. She has received national and international recognition for her scholarship. She has taught as a visiting professor at Williams College, Johns Hopkins, Stanford and Indiana universities, among others. In the past few years, she has presented lectures at a conference on Emily Dickinson in Innsbruck, and has delivered addresses at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, the University of Liverpool, and the universities of Washington, Missouri and Pennsylvania. Gilbert will serve as president of the Modern Language Association for 1996; the group is the largest and most prestigious professional society for scholars of literature. Gilbert also has received many awards. While an undergraduate at Cornell, she won the Morrison Poetry Prize. She has been honored with Guggenheim, Rockefeller and National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships. She was a co-winner of the Ms. magazine "Woman of the Year" award and she received the Eugene Tietjens Memorial Prize awarded by Poetry magazine. Established in 1941 by the Davis Sigma Chi Club, the Faculty Research Lecturer is awarded annually to a faculty member whose research contributions have greatly enhanced human knowledge and have brought widespread honor and recognition to themselves and the university. In 1951, UC Davis Academic Senate assumed responsibility for the award. The most recent recipients have been Shang Fa Yang, professor of vegetable crops (1992); Charles R. Goldman, professor of environmental studies (1993); Thomas W. Schoener, professor of biology and environmental studies (1994); and Peter Marler, professor emeritus of biology and psychology (1995). The recipient delivers a spring lecture on a topic in his or her field of study.