Professor Slater recognised in Queen’s Birthday Honours List
Acclaimed Dickens scholar made MBE for services to literary scholarship
Professor Michael Slater, a Fellow of Birkbeck and Emeritus Professor in the Department of English and Humanities has been awarded an MBE in this year’s Queen’s Birthday Honours List for services to literary scholarship.
Professor Slater worked and taught at Birkbeck for 36 years, until his retirement in 2001. He is one of the world’s most highly-regarded Dickens scholars, and in 2011 he published an acclaimed biography of the Victorian writer. He has previously held the positions of President of the Dickens Fellowship and editor of The Dickensian. Today, he is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of English Studies, University of London.
When welcoming Professor Slater as a Fellow of Birkbeck, the College orator, a colleague of Professor Slater’s from the Department of English and Humanities, said: “He is widely acknowledged and admired as the most generous of scholars. Whether student or colleague, nobody who has ever come to Michael with a question about the nineteenth century has ever failed to be illuminated and amazed by what Michael has been able to give them. He is a walking word-hoard, a living dictionary of phrase and fable, whose brain and tongue brim with the language of literature.”
Professor David Latchman CBE, Master of Birkbeck, said: “Our warmest congratulations go to Michael on this well-deserved recognition of his contribution to literary scholarship. Birkbeck is fortunate that he spent so many years here, inspiring thousands of students and colleagues alike.”
Professor Slater said: "I was (to borrow an expressive phrase from Jaggers in Great Expectations) ‘quite dumbfoundered’ when I received the offer of this Honour! I was pleased to accept it as a sign of the ongoing significance and importance of Dickens and his work in the life of the nation as well, of course, as on personal grounds. I was fortunate in being able to share my lifelong passion for Dickens and his work with so many intakes of wonderful Birkbeck students, especially those on the outstandingly good MA in Victorian Studies, run jointly by the Departments of English and History, which I helped to found. And I look forward every year to participating in the ever-popular Birkbeck Dickens Day which I initiated in 1986 to mark the centenary of the first publication of Pickwick Papers."