Dr. Elizabeth Payne Presented with Red Rose Award by Beta Beta

From left, Kim Gregory, Beta Beta president, Dr. Elizabeth Payne, Reba Greer, Beta Beta member and past Alpha Delta president.
Photo provided

The Beta Beta Chapter of the Delta Kappa Gamma Society International honored Dr. Elizabeth Payne Saturday morning with the Red Rose Award.

The Red Rose Award is given to an outstanding woman who has had a great impact on education and in her community.

A native of Nettleton, Payne joined the faculty at the University of Mississippi in 1997 as Professor of History and Founding Director of the McDonnell-Barksdale Honors College, after serving as Founding Director of the Fulbright Honors Studies at the University of Arkansas. She recently retired from the University in 2018.

Her education and teaching career have taken her to Washington DC, North Carolina, Illinois, Arkansas and back to Mississippi. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree from the Mississippi University for Women, her Master of Theology at Perkins School of Theology at the Southern Methodist University in Dallas, her Master of Arts and her Ph. D.degrees in History at the University of Illinois in Chicago.

She has worked as a lobbyist in Washington DC, a teacher, a research assistant, a visiting Assistant Professor at several colleges, and a visiting scholar at Millsaps.

Payne is a well-known author with numerous published articles and books, including “Reform, Labor and Feminism,” “Margaret Dreier Robins and the Women’s Trade Union League” (University of Illinois Press) and a two-volume “Mississippi Women: Their Histories, Their Lives,” which she co-edited, published by the University of Georgia Press. This project led to a series entitled “Southern Women: Their Lives and Times” with 11 authors following her template on Mississippi Women and who wrote volumes about their own states. The 20th volume in the series has just been published. She has also written several book reviews.

In 2008 she was the first faculty member from the University of Mississippi to receive a prestigious fellowship from the National Humanities Center. In 2012, she received the Humanities Scholar Award from the Mississippi Humanities Council, which is the highest award that the MS Humanities Council bestows. In 2017, she received a lifetime service award from the Southern Association for Women Historians.

Courtesy of the Beta Beta Chapter of the Delta Kappa Gamma Society International