The School of English, QUB, has a long tradition of being successful in the UK/US Fulbright Commission Distinguished Scholar Awards, with two scholars regularly assigned to the School. These scholars will be attached to the School from January–June 2016 and are both offering MA modules (in the programmes: Modern Poetry and Irish Literature):
The Fulbright Scholars will also contribute to the postgraduate and undergraduate teaching profiles of the School of English, offering various specialist seminars and workshops.
The Distinguished Fulbright Scholars: School of English, January to June 2016 will be:
James Arthur, Assistant Professor in The Writing Seminars Department of the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences of Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland is the recipient of the QUB Fulbright Distinguished Scholar Award in Creative Writing for 2016. He is the author of the very highly regarded volume of poems, "Charms Against Lightning" (Copper Canyon Press, 2012), which was also a prestigious Lannan Literary Selection. He has published in numerous major literary and poetic journals in the USA and Canada and has held a Hodder Fellowship (Princeton), a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry (Stanford) and a Houghton Library Joan Nordell Fellowship (Harvard) among various major honours and fellowships. He studied at the Universities of Toronto and New Brunswick in Canada as well as completing the MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Washington in Seattle. While working in the School of English and the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen's during the winter and spring term of 2016 he plans to complete a project on 'Contemporary Northern Irish Poetry' as well as a volume of poems entitled "Entanglement" for Copper Canyon Press.
Margaret (Meg) Tyler, Associate Professor in the Division of the Humanities of Boston University in Massachusetts is the recipient of the QUB Fulbright Distinguished Scholar Award in Anglophone Irish Writing for 2016. She is the author of "A Singing Contest: Conventions of Sound in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney" (Routledge, 2005) as well as a wide range of articles and reviews of contemporary American and Irish poets and volumes of poetry. She has studied at Kenyon College as well as Boston U. She has also held a previous Fulbright award at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, and currently chairs the Institute for the Study of Irish Culture at Boston University. While teaching in the School of English and working at the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen's in early 2016, Meg Tyler plans to develop a research project on 'allusiveness in the poetry of Michael Longley' while teaching seminars on the elegy and 'the broken sonnet.'
The English Society
The English Society organises readings and social events during the academic year. It is run by a committee of students and new committee members are always welcome. Society events feature new writing by students in the university. It is responsible for organising the annual School of English formal dinner and arranges occasional trips to conferences and theatres outside Belfast. Details of events and further information can be found on the English Society noticeboard on the ground floor of 2 University Square, and on the website:
http://www.qub.ac.uk/schools/SchoolofEnglish/AboutUs/TheEnglishSociety/
Creative writing in the School
The School is renowned for its vibrant and highly successful community of creative writers: Ciaran Carson, Leontia Flynn, Glenn Patterson, Tim Loane, Medbh McGuckian, Sinéad Morrissey, Malachi O’Doherty and Ian Sansom. Details of their work can be found in the ‘Staff Profiles’ section. The School also hosts an on-line poetry magazine, POETRY PROPER, which is edited by three former PGR students from the School (Miriam Gamble, Paul Maddern, and Alex Wylie): see
http://poetryproper.blogspot.com/
and publishes Yellow Nib, the annual journal of the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, edited by Leontia Flynn.
The Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry
Poetry is one of the activities for which Queen’s has always been best known. Nobel Prize winner Seamus Heaney was a student and later a lecturer in the School of English at Queen’s, one of a number of internationally renowned poets and writers who have worked or studied at the University over the last forty years. The Centre for Poetry is located in 46-48 University Road, connected to the School through 1 University Square. Its director is the internationally-renowned poet, Professor Ciaran Carson. The creative writing staff are located in the Centre, along with the Heaney Centre Research Fellow. The Centre promotes the study and practice of poetry. It contains a library of contemporary poetry, and runs various events – for example, readings, seminars, creative writing workshops – which complement the activities of the School of English. In the last few years visitors to the School of English have included Allen Ginsberg, James Fenton, Andrew Motion, Carol Ann Duffy, Seamus Heaney, Graham Swift, Alasdair Gray, Simon Callow, Seamus Deane, Edwin Morgan, Paul Durcan, Doris Lessing, Simon Armitage, and Trevor Griffiths. There is a lively and ever-
increasing interactive traffic through the Centre: poets, academics, research students, creative writing students, members of the public, visitors from outside Northern Ireland. The Centre provides a focal point for poetry as a living art, and for criticism of/research into modern poetry: http://www.qub.ac.uk/heaneycentre
Queen’s Writers’ Group
The Queen’s Writers’ Group has been in existence since the first appointment of a Writer-in- Residence at the University in the 1970s. The ethos of the group, however, stretches back still further than that, to the 60s, when the famous Belfast Group - Heaney, Mahon, Longley et al - gathered in the University to read and discuss their work. The Writers’ Group still follows roughly the same format. It is an open forum for anyone interested in writing, from published writers through to absolute beginners, to share their work and discuss it with their peers. The Group meets once a week, on Wednesday afternoons (4.00-6.00pm) in the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry. The atmosphere is open, friendly and inclusive.
For further information contact the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, on (028) 90971070.