MacDonald P. Jackson

MacDonald Pairman Jackson FNZAH, FRSNZ is a New Zealand scholar of English literature. Most of his work is on English Renaissance drama; he specializes in authorship attribution. He is also internationally recognized for his work on Shakespeare's texts.

Jackson was born in Auckland on 13 October 1938, the son of Donald Leslie Jackson and Margaret Wyld Pairman. He married Nicole Phillipa Cameron Lovett in 1964. He is currently Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Auckland.

Jackson was educated at Auckland Grammar School, obtained a BA from Auckland University in 1959 and an MA(English) in 1960. He attended Merton College, Oxford and qualified for B.Litt in 1964. In 1964 he returned to Auckland University as a lecturer. He was appointed Associate Professor in 1978 and Professor in 1989. Jackson obtained a Folger fellowship in 1989 and a Huntington Library fellowship in 1993. He was a Christensen Fellow at St Catherine's College, Oxford in 2000 and S T Lee Professorial Fellow at the School of Advanced Study, University of London from January to June 2005. He received a Distinguished Teaching Award in 2000. He retired from the University in 2004. In 2008 he was made a Fellow of the New Zealand Academy of the Humanities (FNZAH). In 2009 he was appointed a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand (FRSNZ).

Jackson's most recent work was a year long examination of the disputed authorship of the classic poem "The Night Before Christmas", also called "A Visit from St. Nicholas." Jackson applied modern computational stylistics techniques to the corpora of verse left by both claimants, Clement Clarke Moore and Henry Livingston, including a new test, statistical analysis of phonemes. His book, Who Wrote "The Night Before Christmas"? identifies the true author and makes a significant contribution to the field of attribution studies.

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