Eavan Boland, the Bella Mabury and Eloise Mabury Knapp Professor in Humanities and the Melvin and Bill Lane Director of the Creative Writing Program at Stanford University, died at her home in Dublin, Ireland, in late April after suffering a stroke. She was 75 years old. Professor Boland had returned to Ireland in order to be close to her family when Stanford closed its campus and transitioned to online instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic.
A native of Dublin, Boland spent time in London as a teenager when her father was appointed the Irish Ambassador to the United Kingdom. She earned a bachelor’s degree with First Class Honors in English Literature and Language from Trinity College, Dublin in 1966. While in college she published her first collection of poems.
Profesor Boland taught at Trinity College of Dublin, University College Dublin, and Bowdoin College before joining the faculty at Stanford Univerity in 1996. In addition to her many collections of poetry, Professor Boland was the author of Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time (W.W. Norton, 1996) and A Journey with Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet (W.W. Norton, 2012).
Boland was an honorary member of the Royal Irish Academy and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Irish Academy of Letters. She received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Irish Book Awards in 2017.