Dr. Frederick Turner
- Professor Emeritus of Literature and Creative Writing
- Founders Professor (Former)
The University of Texas System supports the professorship.
“UT Dallas is a haven for independent thought and brilliant interdisciplinary collaboration and research. It is also a deeply rewarding place to teach – especially in the School of Arts and Humanities – because of its lively and curious students, its excellent faculty colleagues and its location next to an exciting city. I have found my own strengths here, as many people have.”
Frederick Turner is a poet, a cultural critic, a playwright, a philosopher of science, an interdisciplinary scholar, an aesthetician, an essayist and a translator. He is the author of 28 books, including Natural Classicism: Essays on Literature and Science; Genesis: an Epic Poem; and Rebirth of Value: Meditations on Beauty, Ecology, Religion and Education. His plays Height and The Prayers of Dallas have been performed in various locations.
His contributions as an interdisciplinary scholar have been recognized, cited, or published in many fields such as literary and critical theory, comparative literature, anthropology, psychology, neuroscience, sociobiology, political philosophy, chaos theory, theology, the history and philosophy of science and technology, translation theory and art history. He is or has been a member of several research groups on subjects including the biological foundations of esthetics, artificial intelligence, ecological restoration, law and systems research, time, the sociological study of emotion, chaos theory, and ecopoetics.
He is a winner of the Milan Fust Prize (Hungary’s highest literary honor), the Levinson Poetry Prize (awarded by Poetry), the PEN Dallas Chapter Golden Pen Award, the Missouri Review essay prize, the David Robert Poetry prize, the Gjenima Prize, and several other literary, artistic and academic honors. He has participated in literary and TV projects that have won a Benjamin Franklin Book Award and an Emmy, respectively. He is a fellow of the Texas Institute of Letters, and was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004 and every year following 2006. He retired in 2020.
Turner earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees from Oxford University. He is also a second degree black belt in karate.