Career
McDiarmid was one of the leading members of a pioneering generation of Scottish academics who laboured and campaigned for a proper place for Scotland's literature in Scottish universities. At the opening of his career, no Scottish university had a dedicated professor of Scottish literature; by the time of his death, there were six.
McDiarmid was born in Barrhead in the West of Scotland and educated at the University of Glasgow and Balliol College, Oxford. His teaching career began with a post as assistant lecturer in English at the University of Aberdeen in 1939. This was interrupted in 1941 for military service in World War II as a cryptographer in North Africa and was resumed in Aberdeen in 1945.
For twelve years (1952–1964), McDiarmid lectured at Queen's University, Belfast. His teaching of literature, with its sensitivity to writers and traditions from all parts of the British Isles, was an important influence on the future Nobel Prize winning poet Seamus Heaney, one of his students during that period. He returned to Aberdeen University in 1964 where he remained until retirement in 1982.
Read more about this topic: Matthew Mc Diarmid
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“John Brown’s career for the last six weeks of his life was meteor-like, flashing through the darkness in which we live. I know of nothing so miraculous in our history.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“In time your relatives will come to accept the idea that a career is as important to you as your family. Of course, in time the polar ice cap will melt.”
—Barbara Dale (b. 1940)
“Clearly, society has a tremendous stake in insisting on a woman’s natural fitness for the career of mother: the alternatives are all too expensive.”
—Ann Oakley (b. 1944)