Denis Donoghue

Approved bio 9.2.11 (for Induction)~~University Professor and Henry James Professor of English and American Letters at New York University. His interests include modern English, Irish, and American literature as well as aesthetics and the practice of reading. He has written or edited more than thirty books, includingThe Practice of Reading (1998), for which he was awarded the Robert Penn Warren/Cleanth Brooks Prize in literary criticism. In 1982, he gave the BBC's annual Reith Lectures on The Arts without Mystery. In 1990, he published Warrenpoint, a memoir of his early life growing up in a small town in Northern Ireland. His later books Words Alone: The Poet T. S. Eliot (2000), Adam's Curse: Reflections on Literature and Religion (2001), Speaking of Beauty (2003), The American Classics (2005), On Eloquence (2008), and Irish Essays (2011). He has contributed over many years to The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, The Hudson Review, The New Republic, The Times Literary Supplement, The New Criterion, and other journals. He has received fellowships from The American Council of Learned Societies, The National Humanities Center, and The Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars. He is a Fellow of the British Academy. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1983.