Declan Kiberd

He was close to the Palestinian-born Edward Said, who wrote Orientalism, considered an influential contribution to postcolonial theory. Since 2016, he has been at work on a short monograph about Beckett.

In 2015, Abbey Theatre Press published Handbook of the Irish Revival: An Anthology of Irish Cultural and Political Writings 1891-1922, which Kiberd co-edited P. J. Matthews. Irish President Michael D. Higgins gave a speech on the anthology.

In 2011, John Naughton of The Observer included Kiberd among his list of Britain's three hundred "public figures leading our cultural discourse". In 2019 Kiberd was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Since 2011, Kiberd has been the Donald and Marilyn Keough Professor of Irish Studies and an English professor at the University of Notre Dame.

In 2009, Faber and Faber published Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Living. It argues that Ulysses is a work of popular fiction, always intended for a mass readership, and examines how Joyce's modernist masterpiece reflects and satirises aspects of daily life.

His research interests are primarily Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama (in particular Joyce and Synge), postcolonial theory and children's literature; the latter he was responsible for introducing to the UCD curriculum in 2008.

Another publication of note is Irish Classics, which was awarded the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in 2002.

In 1987, Kiberd co-edited Omnium Gatherum: Essays for Richard Ellmann, which had been intended as a Festschrift for Richard Ellmann, but became a memoria when Ellmann died the same year.

Kiberd has been a columnist with The Irish Times (1985–87) and The Irish Press (1987–93), presenter of the RTÉ arts programme, Exhibit A (1984–86), and a regular essayist and reviewer in The Times Literary Supplement and The New York Times. He occasionally writes short pieces about culture for The Irish Times. He has contributed approximately 5000 words to the London Review of Books over two pieces published in 2000 and 2001, the latter on a William Trevor short story collection and the former on a book by his UCD colleague Angela Bourke.

Kiberd joined University College Dublin (UCD) in 1979 and remained on its staff until 2011. He was UCD lecturer in Anglo-Irish literature from 1979, appointed chair of Anglo-Irish literature and drama in 1997 and held this until 2011, at which time he moved to the U.S.

Eleven years after its foundation, Kiberd taught English at the plate glass University of Kent in Canterbury (1976–77). He then taught Irish in Trinity College Dublin for two years (1977–79).

Kiberd was born in Dublin. His brother Damien is a journalist. Kiberd attended Belgrove Primary School in Clontarf, where he was taught by the novelist John McGahern, before moving to St Paul's College in Raheny. In 1969, he won an award to study Irish and English at Trinity College Dublin, where he was elected a Scholar and got a double first and a Gold Medal. He then went to Linacre College, Oxford, where he took a DPhil under the Joycean biographer Richard Ellmann.

He wrote the introduction to the Penguin Classics "Annotated Student's Edition" of Ulysses, which re-released the Bodley Head/Random House text of 1960-61.

Declan Kiberd (born 24 May 1951) is an Irish writer and scholar with an interest in modern Irish literature, both in the English and Irish languages, which he often approaches through the lens of postcolonial theory. He is also interested in the academic study of children's literature. He serves on the advisory board of the International Review of Irish Culture (which describes itself as influenced by the critical theory developed by the Frankfurt School) and is a professor at the University of Notre Dame and at its campus in Dublin. In recent years and with publications such as After Ireland (2018), Kiberd has become a commentator on contemporary Irish social and political issues, particularly as such issues have been examined by Ireland's writers.