Dr. Nathalia Wright, a native of Athens, Georgia, received the baccalaureate degree from Maryville College in 1933 and the masters and doctoral degrees from Yale University in 1938 and 1949, respectively. She joined the faculty of UT’s English Department in 1949. From 1970 to 1976, she served as associate director of graduate studies in the Department of English. In 1972 she was named University Macebearer (the first woman to be so named), and in 1975 she was designated an Alumni Distinguished Service Professor. She retired in 1982.
She was an internationally recognized scholar in American literature. Among her monographs and edited works are: Melville’s Use of the Bible (1948); Horatio Greenough, the First American Sculptor (1963); American Novelists in Italy (1965); and, with Harold Orton, A Word Geography of England (1974). She held a Guggenheim Fellowship (1953–54), an American Association of University Women Fellowship (1959–60), and was president of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association (1978–79). From 1971 to 1979, she was a member of the board of directors of the American Council of Learned Societies. In 2002 she was named a Notable UT Woman.
Her intellectual contributions to the life of the university have been recognized by placement of a plaque in her honor on a faculty study in the John C. Hodges Library.