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Poet Paul Muldoon has been named the recipient of the 2004 Shakespeare Prize.
The prize, one of the oldest awarded by Alfred Toepfer Stiftung Foundation of Hamburg, Germany, is given every year for outstanding contributions to the European cultural heritage in English-speaking countries. It is presented in the fields of art, literature and humanities and is worth 20,000 euros.
The prize is associated with a scholarship worth 11,040 euros for a promising young artist, nominated by the prize-winner, enabling him or her to study at a German college or university for one year. This year's Shakespeare scholarship goes to Merlene Griffin of Portadown, Northern Ireland.
Muldoon, the Howard G.B. Clark '21 University Professor in the Humanities, planned to attend the awards ceremony Sept. 17 in Hamburg and give a reading of his work.
Muldoon was born in Northern Ireland and moved to the United States in 1987. He joined the Princeton faculty as a lecturer in 1990 and was named a full professor in 1995. He directed the University's Program in Creative Writing from 1993 until 2002. In 1999, he was elected to also serve as a professor of poetry at the University of Oxford.
In 2003, Muldoon won the Pulitzer Prize for ''Moy Sand and Gravel,'' his 25th volume of poetry and the ninth collection of his poems. A fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he was given an American Academy of Arts and Letters award in literature in 1996. His other awards include the 1994 T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry and the 1997 Irish Times Poetry Prize.
Poet and critic Susan Stewart has been chosen for the 2004 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in Memory of Newton Arvin.
Stewart, a professor of English at Princeton, won the award for ''Poetry and the Fate of the Senses,'' published in 2002 by the University of Chicago Press. The $50,000 Capote Award, the largest annual cash prize for literary criticism in the English language, is administered for the Truman Capote estate by the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.
Stewart was scheduled to receive the award and read from her poetry collection ''Columbarium,'' which earlier this year won the National Book Critics Circle Award, on Sept. 17 at the University of Iowa.
''Poetry and the Fate of the Senses'' examines the role of the senses in the creation and reception of poetry. The book was selected for the Capote Award by an international panel of prominent critics and writers. Books of general literary criticism in English, published during the last four years, are eligible for the award.
Stewart is the recipient of a Lila Wallace Individual Writer's Award, two grants in poetry from the National Endowment in the Arts, a Pew Fellowship for the Arts and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation.
Stewart joined the Princeton faculty this summer. She had been the Donald T. Regan Professor in English at the University of Pennsylvania since 1997 and, prior to that, was a faculty member at Temple University since 1978. She teaches the history of poetry and aesthetics at Princeton.
Princeton mathematician Paul Seymour has been awarded the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics' George Polya Prize for his work in the field of combinatorial theory.
Seymour and Neil Robertson of Ohio State University received the award at the society's annual meeting July 12-16 in Portland, Ore. The prize was established in 1969 and is given every two years.
Robertson and Seymour received the prize for their proof of the Wagner Conjecture in the theory of graph minors. According to the society, ''The Robertson-Seymour proof is a true tour-de-force spanning 20 important research papers and providing a structural characterization of finite graphs that has deep and far-reaching consequences.''
Seymour previously served on the faculty at Ohio State, Rutgers and the University of Waterloo. From 1984 to 1996, he was a member of the technical staff and senior scientist at Bellcore. In 1996, he joined the faculty at Princeton, where he currently is professor of mathematics and director of graduate studies in the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics. Robertson, a professor of mathematics at Ohio State, was a visiting professor at Princeton from 1996 to 2001.
The Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics was founded in 1952 to support and encourage the important industrial role that applied mathematics and computational science play in advancing science and technology.
Thomas Spiro, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Chemistry, has been selected to receive two awards from professional organizations.
He will receive the 2005 Founders Award for outstanding achievement in biophysics from the Biophysical Society Feb. 12-16 in Long Beach, Calif. He was chosen for his pioneering role in applying techniques from physics, particularly a procedure called Raman spectroscopy, to understand the function of biological molecules such as proteins and nucleic acids.
He also will receive the 2005 American Chemical Society Award for Distinguished Service in the Advancement of Inorganic Chemistry March 15 in San Diego. He will be recognized for advancing inorganic chemistry through his significant service in addition to his performance of outstanding research.
Spiro has been a faculty member at Princeton since 1963 and served as chair of the Department of Chemistry from 1980 until 1989. He chaired the Bioinorganic Subdivision of the American Chemical Society in 1988.
His laboratory has spearheaded the development of resonance Raman spectroscopy as a tool for revealing the structure and function of biological molecules. The technique takes advantage of the ''Raman effect'' in which light striking a molecule sometimes gains or loses energy in a way that reveals the identity and energy state of the molecule. Spiro received the first Bomem-Michelson Award in 1986 for fundamental contributions to molecular spectroscopy.
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