Derek Attridge

Derek Attridge FBA (born 6 May 1945) is a South African-born British academic in the field of English literature.

Attridge attended Scottsville Government School and Maritzburg College in Pietermaritzburg, Natal, South Africa, and received his Bachelor of Arts (BA) from Natal University in South Africa before moving to the UK in 1966 to complete his Master of Arts (MA) and PhD at Clare College, Cambridge.

He held a Research Lectureship at Christ Church, Oxford, from 1971 to 1973, and then a Lectureship and Senior Lectureship at the University of Southampton.

In 1984 he was appointed Professor in the Department of English Studies at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, and in 1988 moved to the USA, where he joined the English Department at Rutgers University.

In 1998 he was awarded a Leverhulme Research Professorship, which he took up at the University of York, U.K., where he became Professor in 2003.

He is Emeritus Professor of English and Related Literature at the University of York, having retired from the university in 2016, and is a Fellow of the British Academy.

Attridge undertakes research in South African literature, James Joyce, modern fiction, deconstruction and literary theory and the history and performance of poetry.

He is the author or editor of thirty books, and has published eighty articles in essay collections and a similar number in journals.

He has held a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Leverhulme Research Professorship, and Fellowships at the National Humanities Center, the Bogliasco Foundation, the Camargo Foundation, and The Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study, the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, and All Souls and St. Catherine's Colleges, Oxford.

Among the visiting positions he has held have been professorships at the American University of Cairo, the University of Sassari, the University of Cape Town, Northwestern University, Wellesley College, and the University of Queensland.