Nancy Burke (1935–2006)

Professor Nancy Burke was born in 1935 in Bridgeport, Connecticut and educated in the Quaker School of German Town Friends in Philadelphia. She received her Ph.D. from Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She travelled to Spain as a Fulbright recipient in the 1960s and then returned to teach in Columbia, South Carolina. She later moved to Toronto with her husband and two children, where she started a career as an ESL teacher at Seneca College. Here she was known for her inspirational classes in which she taught recently arrived immigrants. Always open-minded and cosmopolitan, in the 1980s she visited Warsaw as an exchange professor to make it her permanent home till her premature death in 2006. In Warsaw she blossomed as an academic teacher, poet and organiser of academic life. Her lectures in American and Canadian literature attracted not only students from the Institute of English Studies, but across departments. She “was incredibly generous with her time and with her knowledge and the students reciprocated with devotion, admiration, and lasting friendship” (Preis Smith, 9). Always stylish, democratic, kind and warm, she had a way of both attracting students to new ideas and challenging them to think independently and trust their own vision. She was an inspirational mentor and one of her M.A. students, Professor Ewa Łuczak, went on to get a Ph.D. degree and pursue an academic career. In Poland, Professor Burke wrote three books of poetry and travelled extensively through Russia and Europe to give readings of her poems. Her poetry was translated into Polish, Russian and Serbian.

Professor Burke was also one of the founders of the Polish Association for Canadian Studies and a director of the Canadian Studies Center at the University of Warsaw. Setting up an underfunded Canadian Center in a small room in the building of the Institute of English Studies, she never complained but was excited that Canadian studies were becoming a permanent fixture on the academic map of Poland. Her dream of setting up a program in Canadian Studies at the University of Warsaw materialised fifteen years after her death in 2022. Restless and energetic, Professor Burke died prematurely and suddenly after one of her numerous trips.

Ewa Łuczak

References:
Preis-Smith, Agata et al. (ed). Mosaics of Words: Essays on the American and Canadian Literary