A fellowship with the Royal Society of Arts has been awarded to Professor Geoff Ward, an expert in American literature at the University of Dundee.
Geoff Ward: "I am very pleased and honoured to be named a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. It is particularly good for a scholar of American literature based in Britain to receive this recognition because we have to work at a considerable distance from out field of interest. It was sometimes hard in my early career to convince Americans that their poets were as important as I thought they were! Poets such as O'Hara and Ashbery were little known outside New York at that point and now are considered major literary figures of the twentieth century. As a critic and literary historian, I'm pleased to have had a part to play in that."
Geoff Ward has held a chair in English at the University of Dundee since 1995. He took a first in English at Clare College Cambridge in 1975 and lectured at Liverpool University before coming to Dundee. His book "Statutes of Liberty" has been praised on both sides of the Atlantic as the definitive as well as the first book on the New York School of Poets. Geoff is the leading international authority on John Ashbery, the most critically esteemed American poet since Wallace Stevens. In 1999 he was awarded a Leverhulme Fellowship to research what promises to be the definitive study of John Ashbery's poetry, and spent much of last year in New York, Washington and Harvard, working on Ashbery's papers.
Geoff has lectured widely on American poetry in the United States, Europe and Japan. A major work on literature from the Puritans to Stephen King will be published next spring.ENDS
Contact Geoff Ward 01382 344413