Elizabeth E. Gunter, Denton, an English department lecturer at North Texas from 1988 through 1989 and 1996 through 1997, died Nov. 6. She graduated in 1963 from Mount St. Agnes College in Baltimore, Maryland, with a bachelor’s in French. In 1969, she earned her first doctorate in romance languages at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Later that year, she began working as an assistant professor of French at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, where she met her husband, the late Pete Gunter, a philosophy professor and a longtime North Texas faculty member. The couple moved to Denton in 1970 and Elizabeth taught French for six years at Mountain View College in Dallas. She and Pete were among a small group of conservationists who in 1974 worked to create the Big Thicket Natural Preserve in Southeast Texas, which was established by Congress as one of the very first national preserves in the nation.

 

In 1981, Elizabeth and North Texas colleague Dr. Bullitt Lowry published the English translation of The Red Virgin: Memoirs of Louise Michel. Elizabeth wrote articles and reviews that appeared in the Texas Observer, Dallas Morning News and Denton Record-Chronicle and edited Texas Books in Review and Focus on Texas. In 1985, she received her second doctorate, in English, from North Texas while teaching in the English department. From 1987 through 1989, she served as associate director of UNT Press and became director of the university’s Center for Texas Studies in 1994. Throughout the 1990s, she managed the American Literary Review and American Periodicals, and in 1998 served as founding president of the Historical Society of Denton County.

 

Known for hosting elaborate dinner parties, Elizabeth frequently opened her home to UNT music students, especially piano students of Dr. Vladimir Viardo, who studied alongside her daughter, Sheila. Mother and daughter studied Russian together at UNT. An avid traveler, Elizabeth also enjoyed opera, piano concerts, the Russian ballet, as well as French chanson singers, and also folk and rock music. She loved cats, shelties and thoroughbred horses.