IASIL Associations News - Reports 2004/2005

Alexander Norman (Derry) Jeffares
11 August 1920 – 1 June 2005

It is with great sadness that we have learned of the death of A. Norman Jeffares, the founder of IASIL and the honorary lifetime president of our Association.

Professor Jeffares was renowned for his work on Yeats, and published widely on Irish, English, American, and other Anglophone literatures. He lectured throughout the world, at universities in Groningen, Edinburgh, Adelaide, Leeds, and. Stirling. He held many posts during his career, with such organisations as PEN Scotland, the Scottish Arts Council, the Arts Council of Great Britain, the Royal Society of Literature, and the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He was Honorary Fellow of Trinity College Dublin, and honorary Doctor of the Universities of Stirling and Lille.

Among his many influential publications are W.B. Yeats. Man and Poet, Letters to W.B. Yeats and Ezra Pound from Iseult Gonne, A Pocket History of Irish Literature, The Poems and Plays of Oliver St John Gogarty, and countless others. In recent years he had been co-editing a four volume anthology of Irish Literature from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

He founded IASIL, and organised its inaugural conference in 1970, and has been a major influence on the development of the Association since that time. He will be sadly missed.

On behalf of IASIL, we offer our sincere condolences to his wife, daughter, and grandson.

Dr Riana O'Dwyer, IASIL President
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