Frances K. McSparran, Ph.D., associate professor of English language and literature in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, will retire from active faculty status on May 31, 2002.

Professor McSparran received her B.A. degree with honors in English language and literature from the Queen's University of Belfast in 1958. From 1962-67 she taught at the Queen's University of Belfast, and she earned her B.Litt. degree from Oxford University in 1965. In 1968, Professor McSparran joined the University of Michigan as a lecturer and as an assistant editor of the Middle English Dictionary. She was promoted to research editor of the Middle English Dictionary in 1971, earned her Ph.D. degree from the Queen's University in 1973, and was promoted to associate professor at the University of Michigan in 1974.

In her career at the University, Professor McSparran made truly extraordinary service contributions in directing the summer program at Oxford University and in her administrative and academic contributions to the completion of the Middle English Dictionary. Her scholarship is characterized by painstaking primary research with the manuscripts of the Middle English period, her care and penetrating analysis as lexicographer and editor, and her innovative work in producing the electronically based Middle English Compendium.

She is internationally well known as a preeminent scholar of Middle English, and she published the highly regarded Octovian Imperator and Octovian. Professor McSparran commands the respect, admiration, and affection of the many undergraduate and graduate students with whom she shared her love of Old and Middle English. Her rigor and enthusiasm made her a most distinguished teacher.

The Regents now salute this distinguished scholar by naming Frances K. McSparran associate professor emerita of English language and literature.