Media Relations
News Releases
For Release Upon Receipt - May 17, 2004
Contact:
Ann Deveney, 617/353-2240, devenea@bu.edu
BOSTON UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR NAMED TO PRESTIGIOUS OXFORD UNIVERSITY POST
(Boston, Mass.) — Eminent literary critic and scholar Christopher Ricks, a Boston University professor and co-director of the University’s Editorial Institute, was recently elected Oxford’s new Professor of Poetry. He replaces poet and academic Paul Muldoon.
In this post, Ricks, a Fellow of the British Academy, will deliver three lectures annually over the next five years at Oxford. He will remain on the faculty of Boston University.
Ricks, BU’s William M. and Sara B. Warren Professor of the Humanities, is also a 2003 recipient of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Distinguished Achievement Award for significant contributions to the humanities. Renowned as a critic, his collections of essays and his books on Milton, Tennyson, Keats, T.S. Eliot, and Samuel Beckett are particularly well known. Most recently he has been acclaimed for his book on singer/songwriter Bob Dylan, “Dylan’s Visions of Sin" (Penguin/Viking, 2003). Ricks is also the editor of two major anthologies: “The New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse” (1987) and “The Oxford Book of English Verse” (1999).
The Professor of Poetry is the only Oxford academic to be elected to his post. Candidates must be nominated by at least 12 members of the University’s graduate body, Convocation. Members of Convocation then vote in person to elect the winner. Previous Oxford Professor of Poetry winners include Matthew Arnold, W. H. Auden, and Seamus Heaney. The post was established in 1708.
Boston University, with more than 29,000 students enrolled in its 17 Schools and Colleges, is the fourth largest independent University in the United States.
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