Educated at Le
Moyne College (B.S.
1959), Syracuse University (M.A. 1962) and Yale
University (Ph.D.,
1966), McGann currently teaches at the University of Virginia (1986-present), where
he arrived after leaving Duke University.
McGann is a member of the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences. Other awards include: Melville Cane Award, American Poetry
Society, 1973, for his work on Swinburne as "The Year's Best Critical Book about
Poetry"; Distinguished Scholar Award from the Keats-Shelley Association of America (1989);
Distinguished Scholar Award from the Byron Society of America, 1989; and the
Wilbur Cross Medal, Yale University Graduate School, 1994.
In 2002 he was the recipient of
three major awards: the Richard W. Lyman Award for Distinguished Contributions
to Humanities Computing,
He has been a Fulbright
Fellow (1965-66), an American Philosophical Society Fellow (1967) and Guggenheim
Fellow (1970-71, 1976-77) and has been awarded NEH grants in 1975-76,
1987-89, 2003-2006, as well as grants from the Getty Foundation and the Delmas
Foundation. He has held more than a dozen other appointments, including
President, Society for Textual Scholarship, 1995-1997; and President, Society
for Critical Exchange, 2005-6. Since 1999 he has been a Senior Research Fellow,
Institute of English Studies, University of London and since
McGann's most notable works were
the two books published in 1983, The Romantic Ideology and A Critique
of Modern Textual Criticism. McGann has also written four books of poetry
including Air Heart Sermons (1976) and Four Last Poems (1996),
both published by Pasdeloup Press in
McGann has been married since
1960 (to Anne Lanni) and has three children (born 1963, 1965, 1967)