Professor Declan Kiberd – upholding the liberal tradition
“Since the world exists, everything in it must be studied, and you have studied it very very well.”
Professor Declan Kiberd’s address at the conferring of Higher Degrees in the College of Arts and Celtic Studies was warmly welcomed by the graduating class. In praising the students, he said, “In an age of rush and of bustle you have helped to uphold the traditional ideal of the university as a place of free fearless enquiry.”
Professor Declan Kiberd is Chair of Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama at the UCD School of English, Drama & Film. His published books include: Synge and the Irish Language (Macmillan, 1979); Men and Feminism in Modern Literature (Macmillan, 1985); Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (Jonathan Cape, 1995); Irish Classics (Grants, 2000); and The Irish Writer and the World (Cambridge University Press, 2005). He also introduced and edited The Annotated Students’ Ulysses (1992) in the Penguin Twentieth Century Classics series.
Professor Kiberd is a director of the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, Ireland. He has been Parnell Fellow at Magdalene College Cambridge, and a visiting professor at Duke University and the Sorbonne.
Hear Professor Kiberd read from his book Ulysses and Us – The art of everyday living (Faber and Faber 2009).