Education
University of Glasgow.
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Matthew McDiarmid
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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 World War II as a cryptographer in North Africa and was resumed in Aberdeen in 1945. Foreign 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.
Membership
He was a founding member of the Association for Scottish Literary Studies (1970) and the first president of the Robert Henryson Society which he also helped to found in 1993. 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.
