Stephen Sexton Named 2025 Charles A. Heimbold Jr. Chair of Irish Studies at Villanova University
Villanova, Pa. – Villanova University selected Stephen Sexton, an award-winning Northern Irish poet and lecturer, as the 2025 Charles A. Heimbold Jr. Chair of Irish Studies in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. The visiting writer-in-residence program offers Irish Studies students the opportunity to participate in a close classroom experience with one of Ireland’s finest authors. Sexton will be in residence during the spring semester, teaching undergraduates, traveling with students to Belfast, giving presentations and readings, and discussing writing and the literature and culture of Northern Ireland.
Sexton attended Queen’s University Belfast for his master’s degree in Creative Writing, where he began to write poetry more seriously. After graduating, he continued at Queen’s for his doctorate in Creative Writing. Oils, his debut pamphlet, was published in 2014 by the Emma Press and won the Poetry Book Society's Winter Pamphlet Choice. In 2017, Sexton finished his PhD and won the United Kingdom National Poetry Competition. The following year, he won an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors.
An international scholar, Sexton’s work has been published in leading journals in the United Kingdom and Ireland, such as Granta, Poetry London and Poetry Ireland Review, as well as several American publications, including POETRY and The Virginia Quarterly Review. His poems were featured in The Future Always Makes Me So Thirsty: New Poets from the North of Ireland (2016). In addition, his poems were featured in Switching Off Darkness: Young Irish Poets, an anthology of poems by Irish writers in Greek translation, published by Vakxikon Publications in 2019.
Sexton is a professor at the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University Belfast, a focal point for creativity in Ireland and recognized as an international center of creative and research excellence in the field of literature. The center has hosted Villanova students and faculty several times through the English Department’s “Writing Through Conflict” course.
As part of the 2025 Villanova Literary Festival, Sexton will present a reading on March 13 at 7 p.m., followed by a reception in the Presidents’ Lounge, Connelly Center on Villanova’s campus. This event is free and open to the public.
The Charles A. Heimbold Jr. Chair of Irish Studies, inaugurated in 2000, has become one of the most prestigious Irish Studies positions in the United States. Former Heimbold Chairs include luminaries from the Irish literary arts such as Marina Carr, Sebastian Barry, Emilie Pine, Mary O’Donoghue, Emma Dabiri, Hannah Khalil, Owen McCafferty, Mary O’Malley and Eamonn Wall.
About the Villanova Center for Irish Studies: The Center for Irish Studies at Villanova University has been a leader for four decades in interdisciplinary teaching and scholarship on Ireland in a global framework. The Center connects students to local community organizations while also preparing them to become citizens equipped to take on the world’s most pressing challenges. Through liberal arts-focused academics, multi-disciplinary scholarship and key partnerships, the Center provides students with research, study abroad and employment opportunities.
About Villanova University’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences: Since its founding in 1842, Villanova University’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences has cultivated knowledge, understanding and intellectual courage for a purposeful life in a challenging and changing world. With more than 40 majors across the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences, it is the oldest and largest of Villanova’s colleges, serving more than 4,500 undergraduate and graduate students each year. The College is committed to a teacher-scholar model, offering outstanding undergraduate and graduate research opportunities and a rigorous core curriculum that prepares students to become critical thinkers, strong communicators and ethical leaders with a truly global perspective.