THE end of what seems to have been a long selection process is hovering in sight as the successor to the late Professor Gus Martin will be formally appointed by the board of the National University of Ireland in early April, writes Eileen Battersby. It is understood Dr Declan Kiberd will fill the chair of Anglo Irish Literature at University College Dublin. Kiberd, a Dubliner, was educated at Trinity College and Oxford University where he completed his doctorate, Synge and the Irish Language, which was later published as a book in 1979.

Author of the recent best selling literary history, Inventing Ireland - the Literature of a Modern Nation (Cape, 1995), Kiberd who was born in 1951, writes in Irish and English, and is a passionate, internationally respected critic and cultural commentator. He was previously appointed Professor of English at University College, Galway, a post which for various family reasons he could not take up. Kiberd is a lively lecturer and an often critically provocative thinker, particularly in the area of colonialist literary theory, and he is very interested in the study of comparative literatures. Under his stewardship, the department of AngloIrish literature can expect an exciting balance between the national and international dimensions.