Plenary Talks
Click on the links below to listen to some of the plenary talks from the MacNeice Conference and Celebration. The files are in wma format. You can also download an mp3 (the files are quite large, and so may take some time to download).
Jon Stallworthy 'Louis in Love'
Jon Stallworthy has been a Professor of English Literature
at Cornell and Oxford, and he is a Fellow of the
British Academy. He is currently Acting
President of Wolfson College Oxford. His books include two critical studies of
Yeats’s poetry; editions of Wilfred Owen’s poetry, and a biography of Wilfred
Owen (1975) which won the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize and the W.H. Smith
Literary Award. His biography of Louis MacNeice was published in 1995 and won
the Southern Arts Prize. Jon Stallworthy’s Collected
Poems and an autobiography, Singing
School, were published in 1998.
Jonathan Allison "Ink is a God-damned frigid medium, isn't it?": Reading Louis MacNeice's letters
mp3
Jonathan Allison lectures in English at the University of Kentucky,
Lexington. He
is the editor of Yeats’s Political
Identities (1996), and co-editor with Andrew Roberts of Poetry and Contemporary Culture: The
Question of Value (2002). He is currently working on an edition of Louis
MacNeice’s Selected Letters.
Peter McDonald The Pity of it All mp3
The First BBC Louis MacNeice Memorial Lecture
Peter McDonald has published three collections of poems,
most recently Pastorals (2004). He
holds the Christopher Tower Tutorship in Poetry in the English Language at Christ Church,
Oxford, and a
lectureship in the English Faculty of Oxford University. His books include Louis MacNeice: The Poet in his Contexts
(1991), Mistaken Identities: Poetry and
Northern Ireland (1997) and Serious
Poetry (2002). He co-edited Selected
Plays of Louis MacNeice (1993), and has re-edited, for Faber, MacNeice’s Collected Poems (2007).
Terence Brown Weaving his Journey: MacNeice & Travel mp3
Terence Brown is Professor of Anglo-Irish literature at
Trinity College Dublin, where he is also a Senior Fellow. He is a member of the
Royal Irish Academy
and of the Academia Europaea, and has lectured widely on Irish literature and
Irish cultural history. His books include Louis
MacNeice: Sceptical Vision (1975), Northern
Voices (1975), Ireland: A Social and
Cultural History: 1922 to the Present (1995) and The Life of W.B. Yeats (1999).
Clair Wills Post-war MacNeice mp3
Clair Wills is Professor of Irish Literature at Queen Mary, University of London. She edited the Contemporary
Writing section of the Field Day
Anthology of Irish Writing, volumes IV and V (2002). Her books include Improprieties: Politics and Sexuality in
Northern Irish Poetry (1993) and Reading
Paul Muldoon (1998). This year (2007) she published with Faber That Neutral Island: A Cultural History of
Ireland during the Second World War, which takes its title from Louis
MacNeice’s poem ‘Neutrality’.
Paul
Muldoon teaches at
Princeton University
. He has published ten books of poetry with Faber, and won a Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin Prize, and the T.S.
Eliot Prize. In 2006 he published
Horse
Latitudes,
a new collection of poems, and
The End of the Poem
, his lectures as Professor of Poetry at Oxford.
Valentine Cunningham is Professor of English Language and
Literature at Oxford University, and Tutor and Senior Fellow in English
Literature at Corpus Christ College,
Oxford. He has
lectured widely around the world and has been a Visiting Professor in the USA, Australia
and Germany.
He reviews widely for various British and American journals and newspapers, and
broadcasts regularly for BBC radio on literary and musicological topics. He has
twice been a judge for the Booker Prize. His books include British Writers of the Thirties (1988) and Reading After Theory (2002).
Neil Corcoran is King Alfred Professor of English Literature
at the University of Liverpool, and previously taught at the universities
of Sheffield, Swansea and St
Andrews. His books include a study of Seamus Heaney, English Poetry since 1940 (1993), and Elizabeth Bowen: The Enforced Return
(2004). He is editor of The Cambridge
Companion to Twentieth-Century English Poetry, due in 2008.