Nancy West, Honors College Director

Nancy West has made it her mission to foster creativity across campus.  In her research, West explores themes ranging from tabloid newspapers to Masterpiece Theater.  As part of the Honors College, she develops courses on topics like Sherlock Holmes and the history of chocolate.  Meet Nancy West, Director of Mizzou’s Honors College.

Her Campus Mizzou: You joined Mizzou’s English Department in 1995 before leaving in 2012 to become Director of the Honors College.  What brought you here?

Nancy West: Being an English professor is kind of like being in the military: You go where the action is, where the job offers are.  Also, I wanted to work at a major research university.  When a professor becomes tenured here (when they are offered a permanent position), they are expected to devote 40 percent of their time to teaching, 20 percent to service such as committee work and advising student projects and 40 percent to research. 

HCM: What do you do as Director of the Honors College?

NW: I spend a lot of time in meetings.  Mostly I meet with faculty and department chairs to discuss the development of new Honors courses.  I also meet with students to talk about issues they’re facing and with donors to talk about future Honors scholarships.  I feel like I know the university so much better than before (I had this job). 

HCM: What makes a course an Honors course?

NW: People talk about how Honors courses are more in-depth, but that’s not a good answer.  This summer, the Honors College will be thinking about this question more seriously and developing an answer.  When a faculty member comes to me and asks about teaching an Honors course, I tell them to be more creative and experimental than in a normal course. They should give students more reigns in class and nurture creativity.  They should foster more in-depth conversations and assume that the student is an active consumer of knowledge instead of a passive participant.

HCM: You’ve done quite a lot of research in your time.  In addition to writing books about the Kodak camera company’s effect on collective memory and about tabloid news in the 20’s and 30’s, you’re currently working on a history of the PBS show Masterpiece Theater.  How did you become interested in this topic?

NW: I grew up poor in the tenements of New Jersey. My mother, an immigrant, thought that watching Masterpiece was a stamp of class, of education, that she couldn’t have given me otherwise (Masterpiece airs for free on PBS).  So I’ve watched since I was a kid. I watched throughout college with girlfriends, throughout grad school with girlfriends, and I have friends over nowadays to watch it as well.

HCM: Your mom grew up in Germany. How did she come here?

NW: My mother was a refugee from the Sudetenland (a part of the former Czechoslovakia that was taken over by Germany during World War II) who fled the area after Russian troops liberated the area after 1945.  After fleeing, she, her two brothers and father were homeless.  While her brothers chose to stay in what became East Germany, my mother moved to West Berlin and then America in 1961 shortly before the Berlin Wall was constructed.  She kept in touch with family through letters, which would arrive with big black lines through them (the Communist police read and censored correspondence, especially if it was associated with America).  She didn’t actually see her brothers until 1989, though, when the Wall fell and never saw her father again as he died during Communism.  My mother personally experienced World War II and Communism. She had a hard life.