Two Coastal Carolina University professors have received the 2003 Governor's Award for the Humanities, according to an announcement from The Humanities Council.

Sara L. Sanders, a professor of English, and Stephen J. Nagle, distinguished professor emeritus, will receive the award at a public presentation event Sept. 25 in Columbia. The York County Culture and Heritage Commission also received the award.

This year's winners of the award were cited for their "significant contributions to the cultural life of South Carolina" and for creating "a greater public understanding and appreciation of the humanities."

Sanders and Nagle, who are married, have worked collaboratively in scholarly work in second-language learning and southern English studies. They recently co-edited a book published this spring called "English in the Southern United States," a textbook for linguistics studies. Nagle retired from Coastal this summer after 31 years of teaching English.

Other highlights of their shared academic career include:

- Since the early 1990s the couple has given scores of scholarly presentations and published separately and together more than 20 research articles on topics in the humanities ranging from histories of English and southern English to the language of political correctness.

- They co-designed a 1992 Fulbright-Hays Group Projects Abroad project enabling 15 South Carolina teachers to spend the summer of 1992 in Poland studying the post-communist transition. Nagle recently returned from leading 16 South Carolina teachers to Poland this summer to study the amalgamation efforts of Central European countries seeking European Union membership.

- They have both been recipients of Coastal's Distinguished Teacher-Scholar Lecturer award, sponsored annually by Horry Telephone Cooperative, Inc. The award is presented to faculty members who have outstanding abilities as teachers, scholars and communicators.

A native of Brooklyn, N.Y., Nagle joined the Coastal faculty in 1972 and was director of International Programs at Coastal from 1987 to 2001. He is founder of the Palmetto Partnership for International Exchange and is a former executive director of the South Carolina Consortium for International Studies. In 1999 he was named a Fellow of University College-Northampton in the United Kingdom.

He was educated at the University of South Carolina, where he earned a bachelor's degree in French in 1970, a master's degree in linguistics in 1972 and a doctorate in linguistics in 1986.

A native of South Carolina, Sanders joined the Coastal faculty in 1987. She is a graduate of Baptist College of Charleston (now Charleston Southern University) and earned a master's degree and a Ph.D. in linguistics, both from the University of South Carolina. She was director of Coastal's Honors Program from 1992 to 1996 and received the Student Affairs Division Award for 1995-1996. Sanders is also a consultant to the Mercy Hospice Illness Narratives Research Team and a member of the board for Coastal's Center for Women's Advocacy.

Nagle retired in June. He and Sanders are currently research partners in a project that includes linguistic analysis of metaphors in a collection of hospice illness narratives.