Name Michael Wood | Role Author | |
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Education University of Cambridge (1962) Awards Guggenheim Fellowship for Humanities, US & Canada Books Film: A Very Short Introduction, Literature and the taste of k, Yeats and Violence, Alfred Hitchcock: The Man, The magician's doubts | ||
Michael wood in search of beowulf
Michael Wood born in Lincoln, England, was director of the Gauss Seminars in Criticism at Princeton from 1995 to 2001, chaired Princeton's English department from 1998 to 2004, and still teaches at Princeton today, where he is professor emeritus. He is one of the foremost literary and cultural critics in the English-speaking world, and is an author of critical and scholarly books as well as a highly respected writer of reviews, review articles, and columns. He writes in literary publications such as The New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books, where he is also an editorial board member and where his column, "At the Movies", is highly regarded. Wood also teaches at Middlebury College's Bread Loaf School of English in Vermont during the summers.
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Prior to teaching at Princeton, he taught at Columbia University in the Department of English and Comparative Literature, lived briefly in Mexico City, and then took the chair of English at the University of Exeter in Devon, England. He was a modern languages undergraduate at St. John's College, at the University of Cambridge. A specialist in French and German, he studied under J. P. Stern and went on as a graduate student at Cambridge as well as a prize fellow.
In addition to countless reviews, he also has written books on Nabokov, the trans-historical appeal of the oracle from the Greeks to the cinema, on the relations between contemporary fiction and storytelling, and on figures in the modern cultural pantheon including Luis Buñuel, Franz Kafka, Stendhal, Gabriel García Márquez and W. B. Yeats.
Wood lives in London with his wife, Elena Wood Uribe, and has three children: Gaby Wood, who is the literary director of the Man Booker Prize; Patrick Wood, a former professor at Boston University now Head of Academic Research at Kensho Technologies; and Tony Wood, a journalist and former assistant editor of the New Left Review.