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Poet Muldoon Accepts Professor Role At Ulster

30 April 2010

Paul Muldoon, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, has been appointed a Visiting Professor at the University of Ulster.

A professor at Princeton, one of the USA’s top ‘Ivy League’ universities, he is a luminary of a generation of Irish poets whose works are celebrated worldwide.  From 1999 to 20004, he was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford.

The University of Ulster announced today that he has agreed to be a Visiting Professor in the School of English, History and Politics.

Professor Muldoon, speaking from his New Jersey office, said:” I'm really glad to be establishing an academic connection with the University of Ulster, particularly at a time of such opportunity and optimism. It will be a pleasure to try to help some students make sense of their lives through literature and to try to reconnect critical commentary with a critique of a community.”

Professor Pól Ó Dochartaigh, Dean of the Faculty of Arts, says Professor Muldoon’s acceptance of the role adds a new dimension to the University’s stature in creative arts and will expand the student experience at Ulster.

He said: “It’s great to see a willingness on the part of an Armagh man like Muldoon, who has lived in the USA since 1987 and is a Professor at Princeton University, to come back and give something to young people on his home patch.”

Muldoon is Howard G. B. Clark '21 Professor at Princeton and Chair of the Peter B. Lewis Center for the Arts. In 2007 he was appointed Poetry Editor of The New Yorker. He is an honorary Fellow of Hertford College, Oxford.

The poet, who was born near the Moy, Co Armagh in 1951, gained recognition with his first collection New Weather in 1973. Prolific output in a range of writing forms has established him as a distinctive and versatile voice. He has won a string of prestigious awards andis in demand for public readings and lectures on both sides of the Atlantic.

Professor Ó Dochartaigh said: “Paul Muldoon is among the foremost poets that Ireland has produced in any era and both students and the wider public will benefit from his visits to the University.

“The Faculty of Arts is delighted that Professor Muldoon has accepted this invitation.  Creative writing is a strong element in our English courses at Coleraine and seminars by Paul Muldoon, a Pulitzer Prize winner for poetry, will tremendously enhance the student experience at Ulster.”

A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Muldoon was given an American Academy of Arts and Letters award in literature for 1996.

Other recent awards are the 1994 T. S. Eliot Prize, the 1997 Irish Times Poetry Prize, the 2003 Pulitzer Prize, the 2003 Griffin International Prize for Excellence in Poetry, the 2004 American Ireland Fund Literary Award, the 2004 Shakespeare Prize, the 2005 Aspen Prize for Poetry, and the 2006 European Prize for Poetry.

He has been described by The Times Literary Supplement as "the most significant English-language poet born since the second World War."