Paul Muldoon
Photo: Denise Applewhite
Paul Muldoon, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and a Princeton faculty
member since 1990, has been selected as the founding chair of the new
University Center for the Creative and Performing Arts.
The center is part of a major initiative
announced by President Shirley M. Tilghman in January to enhance the
role of the creative and performing arts in the life of the University
and its community. Tilghman also announced a $101 million gift from Peter B. Lewis, a 1955 graduate and trustee of the University, that will help support the initiative.
Muldoon, the Howard G.B. Clark '21 University Professor in the
Humanities, will begin his three-year appointment as the center's chair
on April 1.
"I am delighted that Paul Muldoon has agreed to become the founding
chair of the University Center for the Creative and Performing Arts,"
Tilghman said. "As one of the most pre-eminent poets of his generation,
as well as a dedicated teacher and a seasoned administrator, Paul is
the ideal person to launch this exciting new initiative for Princeton."
The center is intended to serve as a focal point for scholarship,
teaching and practice in the arts and to provide leadership and
advocacy for the arts at Princeton. Muldoon will oversee, coordinate
and encourage exchange among the University's curricular programs in
creative writing, theater and dance, and the visual arts. He also will
work closely with the Program in Music Performance in the Department of
Music, the University Art Museum and the Council of the Humanities.
In addition to the center, elements of the initiative include an
expansion of programs in the arts; a significant increase in the number
of artists teaching, creating new work and collaborating on research at
Princeton; and the creation of improved and expanded physical
facilities for the study and presentation of the creative and
performing arts. The plan is an outgrowth of work done last spring by
the President's Task Force on the Creative and Performing Arts, a
faculty committee that Tilghman charged with developing alternatives
for the expansion of the arts at Princeton. Muldoon was a member of
that group.
"We've come to understand more widely at Princeton that the arts may be
central to the experience here -- not necessarily overshadowing any of
the other areas that a student might pursue -- but that there's
something about the way in which the arts make us understand who we are
and what we're doing that I think has become, particularly under
President Tilghman's leadership, more central to the University's idea
of itself," Muldoon said. "I'm especially keen to help develop that
idea."
Muldoon said that he looks forward to working with interested parties from a variety of fields on planning for the center.
"We want to open up things a great deal more," he said. "Sometimes
there's been a feeling that the arts are for someone else, for
somewhere else, at some other time. I'd like to think Princeton
students will have a sense that making art is for them, here and now."
"We will be attempting to make it clear that the arts are central to
the life of an educated person, whether she or he might be majoring in
chemical engineering or computer science or whatever it might be," he
added. "One of the delights of Princeton has to do with the curriculum
that allows computer science and chemical engineering and comparative
literature majors to write poetry and paint and produce plays."
Muldoon was born in Northern Ireland and worked in Belfast from 1973 to
1986 as a producer of radio and television programs on the arts for the
British Broadcasting Corp. He moved to the United States in 1987,
joined the Princeton faculty as a lecturer in 1990 and was named a full
professor in 1995. From 1999 to 2004, he also held the honorary
position of professor of poetry at Oxford University.
Muldoon directed the University's Program in Creative Writing
from 1993 until 2002 and is serving as acting director this year. He
also chairs the Fund for Irish Studies, which offers courses and
sponsors events about Ireland, and co-chairs the Princeton Atelier
program, which brings guest artists to campus to collaborate with
students and faculty.
Muldoon won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for poetry for "Moy Sand and
Gravel," his ninth collection of poems. His 10th collection, "Horse
Latitudes," is due to appear in the fall of 2006. A fellow of both the
Royal Society of Literature and the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences, he was given an American Academy of Arts and Letters award in
literature in 1996. His other awards include the 1994 T.S. Eliot Prize
for Poetry, the 1997 Irish Times Poetry Prize, the 2003 Griffin
International Prize for Excellence in Poetry, the 2004 American Ireland
Fund Literary Award, the 2004 Shakespeare Prize and the 2005 Aspen
Prize for Poetry.
Muldoon also has published in the fields of drama, literary criticism,
translation and children's literature. In addition, he has delved into
the musical arena, most recently writing an original chamber opera with
composer Daron Hagen that was produced by students in Princeton's
Atelier last spring. He writes lyrics and performs on guitar and
percussion in Rackett, a rock band he formed in 2004 with Princeton
Professor of English Nigel Smith and three other part-time
musicians.
