The Center for American Studies benefits from the Fulbright program on a systematic basis. Fulbright scholars from the United States contribute to the active academic life of the Center while in residence by teaching seminars in areas of expertise beyond those of the regular faculty, by sharing their perspectives on current developments in American Studies, and by offering public lectures on a variety of topics.
As a testament to the enduring impact of the Fulbright program, we're delighted to share memories from our past Fulbright professors. These reflections, graciously provided by Professor Jerzy Durczak, offer glimpses into the enriching experiences and lasting connections formed during their stays at Maria Curie-Sklodowska University.
We extend our gratitude to all past Fulbright scholars and eagerly anticipate the continued collaboration that will undoubtedly shape the Center's academic landscape for years to come.
is currently Chair of the English Department of Central New Mexico Community College, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. In the past he taught at the University of New Mexico and at the University of Maryland, European Division. He has a Master’s Degree in English (1973) and a Ph.D. in American Studies (1980), from the University of New Mexico. He has published in Early American literature and in American poetry. After thirty years of teaching, he will be retiring in August 2011.
The faculty, students, and people that I met in Lublin were generous and kind, with manners and friendliness that I still vividly recall. I had the ‘luck’ to be a Senior Fulbright Scholar during the year of change in Poland (1988-1989), and witnessed the first elections in June 1989. During the election, I spoke with Lech Walesa (through an interpreter!) at the Solidarity Church in Gdansk. One of my most vivid recollections is of the beautiful Lublin Cemetery on All Saints Day, November 1: The hundreds of thousands of flickering candles that evening remind me still of life and of passing, of the past and of the future. Those candles, the university, the lush green of the Spring, the wonderful faculty, the various meals in many venues (this was before the economic and political changes), the swans flying at a lake-retreat literature conference—all swirl within me in recollection of my time in Poland.
Soon after his year in Lublin,
served as a Fulbright Lecturer on American Literature at Seoul National University in Korea. Meanwhile, his regular job was as Professor of English at Tennessee Technological University. His publications, mainly on twentieth-century American fiction, included articles on Thomas Wolfe, Robert Penn Warren, and John Updike, and a book on the short stories of Bobbie Ann Mason. He retired from teaching in 2005 but is still working for Educational Testing Company, focusing primarily on the analytical writing section of the Graduate Record Examination. In partial retirement he is enjoying travel and finally getting to read some of those books that were set aside because of classroom demands.
My family and I arrived in Lublin at an exciting but occasionally difficult time. In 1977 freedoms (and food supplies) were somewhat limited, but the cordiality and helpfulness of colleagues and newly acquired friends knew no bounds. They assisted with housing, medical care, and other incidental problems, while we enjoyed learning about a new country and culture. Some academic customs (e.g., students presenting flowers to their teachers on the successful completion of oral exams) were refreshingly different from those in the United States. My students also provided many new insights into the familiar texts of American literature that I had come to teach. I learned, for example, that Thoreau's preachings on economy had limited relevance to an economic system already plagued by shortages, and that some of Faulkner's defeated but proud Southern protagonists acquired added resonance for readers in a country whose very existence had been threatened over several centuries. As is often the case for teachers, during my time at UMCS, I gained far more knowledge than I imparted.
is the Emily H. Fisher Professor of Literature at Bard College at Simon’s Rock. A member of the National Book Critics Circle and PEN, and a consulting editor of the journal Philip Roth Studies, he is the author of Philip Roth: A Bibliography (1974; revised and expanded 1984), Philip Roth (1978), and Voices and Visions: Selected Essays (2001), and the editor of Critical Insights: John Updike (2011) and Critical Insights: Salman Rushdie (forthcoming in 2012). His essays and reviews on modern and contemporary American literature and culture— as well as writers such as Rushdie, Kundera, Appelfeld, Milosz, and McEwan—have been published in The Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual , Critique, Chicago Review, The Chicago Tribune, Illinois Issues, Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations of Portnoy’s Complaint, Kwartalnik Neofilologiczny (Warsaw), MELUS, Philip Roth Studies, The World & I, Magill’s Literary Annual, Magill’s Survey of World Literature, Magill’s Book Reviews, Masterplots II and IV, and The Berkshire Eagle, and been broadcast on WBBM-AM and WNIB-FM in Chicago. He has also served in administrative posts, including special assistant to the chancellor of the City Colleges of Chicago and dean of academic affairs at Simon’s Rock; from 1987 to 2004, he was a vice president of Bard College and the dean of the college at Simon’s Rock.
Although it has now been thirty-one years since my Fulbright at UMCS—I ended my stay a month or so before the summer 1980 strikes in Lublin and Gdansk began the decade of challenge and change that culminated in 1989—my memories of Poland and the university are still very vivid and precious to me. Most powerful, of course, are my memories of the people. Of the bright young colleagues, then at the beginning of their careers, whom I have never forgotten—especially Jurek and Joanna Durczak and Jurek Kutnik—whose intelligence, wit, kindness, and generosity made the year a personal and professional joy. Of the students I came to know, whose desire to learn more about American literature and culture was voracious and wide-ranging, and whose eagerness and liveliness made teaching there a special pleasure. And of the many kind and warm people I didn’t even know, with whom I shared standing in lines outside of shops, riding trains and buses, and cigarettes. Then there are the many images: of the orientation my group of Fulbrighters was given in our first weeks in Poland, which took us to Warsaw, Krakow, Jadwisien (sp?), and Zakopane; of visiting other cities such as Lodz and Gdansk; of the little garden plots people kept down the road from our apartment; of late night conversations with colleagues and students in our apartment. And, most haunting and touching, of standing on the balcony at the rear of that apartment, which looked out on a cemetery, stunned to silence and tears at dusk on All Saints Day by the sight of the hundreds of candles people quietly carried as they came to honor their dead.
I went to Poland because I wanted to see the country and the part of the world from which three of my grandparents came, and because my interest in Eastern European literature had been aroused by the series “Writers from the Other Europe” that Philip Roth edited for Penguin. I came back more connected and interested than ever. I still teach a course on those writers—in which I regularly revisit the work of Schulz, Borowski, Konwicki, Milosz, Herbert, Szymborska, and others with my students; and I continue to follow events in Poland, and histories of the region, with particular interest. (This spring I read--and heartily recommend—Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, which told me things about Polish history that I wish I’d known before I went there; and Timothy Garton Ash’s latest collection of essays, Facts Are Subversive, in which he continues the insightful reports on the region that he has been making for more than two decades.) When I came to Poland in 1979, access to books in English was so difficult that I brought several trunkloads of them with me to make sure my students would have the texts I wanted them to read. Today, I know, all that has changed, as has people’s ability to travel freely throughout the world. But my guess is that UMCS’s Departments of American Literature & Culture, and American Studies, remain an island populated by faculty and students of broad curiosity and serious intellectual ambition, of passionate and engaged readers and thinkers who still make it a special, and extraordinary, place. Some day, I hope to return and see that for myself.
After teaching for two years in Lublin,
returned to the University of Massachusetts – Boston, where in addition to teaching, he served as Director of the Freshman Writing program. He liked that job so much he decided to become a full-time administrator at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts as an academic dean. He worked with students who wanted to study abroad, gain admission to law school, and, alas, those for whom university life was not working out very successfully. Then, he became Dean of the College at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania with the responsibility of creating a coherent academic program for all students from the first day of Freshman Orientation until the day they graduated. In fact, at the commencement ceremonies, he stood at the podium and read the names of all the students as they received their diplomas from the president. Fortunately, Lafayette is a small liberal arts college with a graduating class of about 500.
Chris took early retirement in 2001. Then he and his wife Donna lived in the Middle East for four years and taught English and American literature at Sultan Qaboos University in Oman. They lived right next door to a mosque and enjoyed hearing the call to prayer five times a day. Although nominally retired since 2005, Chris has been teaching a great books course for an online university for the last six years. But he thinks it is time to retire from that job and devote more time to reading, taking walks with his dog, and enjoying his family (his wife Donna, a grown son and daughter, and one grandson).
I remember our apartment on Lipowa Street; our windows looked out on a cemetery, and I loved walking along Lipowa in the morning on the way to the university. Sometimes we walked through the cemetery; it seemed a rather inviting place. What I remember most was the friendliness and generosity of our colleagues in the department: picnics with Hanka Zagórska and her husband and Teresa Olszewska, spirited conversations with Edmund Gussman (we saw a lot of Ed in Boston during the year he was conducting research at MIT), dinners with Małgosia Górna and her parents. Other memories. Once in the American literature survey course, I was going on enthusiastically about Thoreau’s “Walden.” Our discussion wasn’t going very well when finally one student blurted out, “We don’t think much of Thoreau; our grandparents lived that way!” When I mentioned that Thoreau had died of TB, someone said, “See. That just proves our point. That was no way to live.” Sometimes Donna took her conversation class to the student cafeteria for informal talk. When there were just women in the group, they would gossip mercilessly about the men in their class.
It seems a life time ago when Donna and I lived in Poland. Thirty-six years to be exact. How the world has changed, but hopefully not our memories of Lublin.
Professor in the Department of English, has taught at the University of Montana since 1999. Before this, he had appointments at the University of Texas at Austin, Miami (of Ohio) University and SUNY—Albany. He earned his Ph.D. from New York University and spent three years in Poland, 1986 to 1989, the first two as a Fulbright Lecturer in American literature at UMCS, the third as an Americanist at Warsaw University. He is the author of four scholarly books—The Patient Particulars: American Modernism and the Technique of Originality (1995), Hints and Guesses: William Gaddis and the Fiction of Longing (1997), Uncommon Readers: Denis Donoghue, Frank Kermode, George Steiner and the Tradition of the Common Reader (2003), and Omissions Are Not Accidents: Modern Apophaticism from Henry James to Jacques Derrida (2010). He is currently working on a monograph devoted to the English novelist Penelope Fitzgerald (1916 - 2000).
In the fall of 1986, I arrived at UMCS from University of Texas at Austin, where an office mate and good friend, Professor Jerzy Wełna, himself on a Fulbright from Warsaw University, had encouraged me to apply. I met a number of wonderful people, people whom I continue to have the fondest affection for. Colleagues at UMCS were great and I found that the English Program then had, and might still have, perhaps the best American literature and culture program in the country. The students were also a delight, and I continue to look back on my two years in Lublin with the greatest affection.
Politically, it was a tense time, not only within Poland’s borders but also between the Cold War adversaries. American diplomats were not allowed to leave Warsaw unless they had state sanction. In the months before my arrival, there was (not very far east) the Chernobyl disaster, forcing the early departure of my pregnant predecessor, Professor Jill Goodman. Her husband, meanwhile, had been arrested (or so I was told) for taking photographs too near the Soviet border. Also arrested at about this time was Stan Musical, the great retired baseball player while on a trip (near Lodz) to promote baseball in the country of his ancestors. In my first week, I myself was asked if I wished to know (I didn’t) the names of those students thought to be police informants; and there were invitations from the police to visit them at headquarters, in addition to a friendly visit to my apartment from one of their rank. In my second year, there were student demonstrations, nearby the Catholic University campus, and things threatened to explode. They didn’t, fortunately, for the reforms outpaced the incipient violence. Meanwhile, General Jaruzelski could, without significant entourage, be seen visiting his mother’s grave, right behind my apartment block on Ulica Lipowa.
Following my two-year stint at UMCS, I took a post, teaching American literature, at Warsaw University. That too offered great rewards, though I missed the camaraderie that the UMCS English Institute offered and the charms of the smaller, less stressful, city. Surrounded by beautiful countryside, Lublin suited me well, better than would have the postings in some of the larger, more industrial cities that some other Fulbrighters occupied.
In June of 1989, shortly after the first post-communist era election, I left Poland when offered a teaching position in the American Midwest, at Miami (of Ohio) University. When leaving, I felt that it would not be long before I returned, but time has a way of moving on faster than we anticipate, and it was not until a few years ago that I did return. Much, of course, had changed, including the sprouting up of a rather swanky mall on my own Ulica Lipowa. And, of course, the University had seen physical improvements, including the addition of handsome new faculty offices and a great canteen, where I lunched with former English colleagues. The changes, both in Lublin and Warsaw, struck me as largely good ones, though many of the things that I loved about the old Poland were still in evidence as well. My hope is that my next visit will come sooner than the last, and that I will be joined by my sons, who have not yet visited Poland, though my older son almost lives in a red, Poland-celebrating t-shirt that I brought back after my last visit.
served as chairperson of the Department of American Thought and Language (since renamed the Department of Writing, Rhetoric and American Cultures) at Michigan State University from 1995 through 2007. He subsequently served as Senior Associate Dean in the College of Arts and Letters for three years and as acting chairperson of the Department of Spanish & Portuguese for two years. He is the co-author of books on American poetry and painting, sports history, film history and studies. He was an Associate Editor of Volumes I and II of The Journalism in the Collected Writings of Walt Whitman (19998, 2003), and with Professor Jason Stacy is preparing Volume III. His published book chapters and articles cover such areas as nineteenth-century American literature and culture, popular literature and historical fiction, sports literature and films, issues of sports and society, and popular culture. He has given papers at more than 15 international conferences and currently serves as International Director of the Popular Culture Association. He served as President of the Popular Culture Association from 1997-1999 and as director of the organization’s Endowment Fund and grants program. His current research project involves researching and writing Volume III of Michigan State University’s Sesquicentennial History, covering the late 1960s to the present. He is a member of the core faculty of the American Studies Program.
My Fulbright year of 1976-1977 at UMCS in the Institute of English Philology was a memorable and rewarding one. I had the good fortune of working with Professor Franciszek Lyra, who was in charge of the American Literature section. His hospitality, friendliness, and graciousness will always be appreciated, as will that of our appointed “shepherd,” Professor Artur Blaim. After my stay we later co-edited an issue of an American Studies journal on the reception of American writers in Poland. While the teaching load was much heavier than I expected, I enjoyed continuing a seminar on Southern women writers and starting a seminar on the 20th century American novel. Part of enjoying the teaching experience was learning to adjust to a different curriculum and academic culture, and our colleagues (my wife also taught in the Institute) helped us do this. We were there in the time that Edward Gierek was the party first secretary, there were some shortages of basics, and our phone was tapped and our mail read. However, the friendliness and helpfulness of everybody in the Institute and our sense of sharing and dealing with the everyday realities and challenges of our colleagues made the year special. Now after 35 years we still have close friends in Poland and communicate with them regularly. Lublin and UMCS remain a special place in our hearts and memories.
was Professor of English and Comparative Literature at California State University Fullerton from 1970 until retirement in 2003. She also taught at Stanford University, the University of California at Irvine, California State University Los Angeles, California State University Dominguez Hills, the Bread Loaf School of English in Vermont and the Poetry Therapy Institute of Los Angeles. She was Resident Director of the California State University program in Florence, Italy in 1982-83. Her field of interest is American multi-ethnic literature with a specialization in American Indian literatures. Books include a critical study of the fiction of Leslie Marmon Silko, an edition of critical essays on early Native American writing, a detective novel in a series of ESL readers, and a handbook on poetic forms. One of her earliest publications appeared in Kwartalnik Neofilologiczny, and her latest conference presentation was in Warsaw for the 2010 conference on Postcolonial Discourse. She was a member of Multi-Cultural Writers of Southern California and published poems and creative work in their anthology, Sowing Ti Leaves and in other anthologies and periodicals.
When I try to remember my time in Poland, the year I spent as Fulbright lecturer at Marie Curie-Sklodowska University and the two summers I taught in the Poznan seminar, I think of the students I taught and met and was ever indebted to. There was only one rule, I told each class: when they were with me, everyone must speak English, not just to me but to each other as well. I would accept all invitations and sometimes call on them for help. They were hospitable and generous with their time and talents. What I remember: conversations in tea rooms, cafes, restaurants, riding crowded buses to visit country villages, hospitality in homes and flats, horseback riding lessons, sometimes little get-togethers in my tiny apartment. When I was a student myself back in pre-history my own mind was awakened in such off-class debates and dialogues with my fellow students, and I hoped something similar might take place in Lublin with my students. Now some of them are professors of English and American Studies. I hope that all of them were able to benefit in some way from that injunction: "English, please."
Colleagues who remain in memory were consistently generous and kind. Leszek Kolek and his family invited me as a guest more than once; I particularly remember Leszek's father, a musician. Bob and Danuta Marek remained friends through the years; on his first Fulbright in the U.S. Bob became friends with my mother, a few years later we were able to meet Magda when they spent Christmas with us. Maria Dakowska also visited me in California when she had study grants. Then there were the unforgettable James Cormick, British Council lecturer, and the legendary Alina Szala.
In May of 2010 my husband and I visited Warsaw, Lublin and Mazury. I wanted to see what had changed since 1975, when I had last been in Poland. Whenever people asked what the changes seemed like I was at a loss for words. I could not help thinking of Rip van Winkle. What was different? There was traffic, there was advertising--no longer novelties--but that did not seem to explain much. Then it occurred to me that whenever we got tea it came in cups with a little English-style teapot. Now drinking tea from a glass was something I had always thought of as a charming Polish if not general eastern European custom, and besides I liked the idea of everyday glass of such high quality. I had regretted not bringing back a set of tea glasses when I went home in the 70s, and thought I might even buy some this time. But they were not to be seen. Whatever happened to tea glasses, I asked. Oh, everyone was so happy to be rid of tea glasses. Who knew that tea glasses were apparently weighted with political subtext. So much was strange and disorienting. There is no denying a faster pace of life, an energy and liveliness. I’m still trying to figure it all out.
Because I was the only American in Lublin I sometimes was called on to assist or entertain other Americans passing through. There was a couple who came for a few weeks to confer with a mathematician. I asked them what they would like to see, and they said Majdanek, so I took them there. I had not gone before. The camp was a deserted, empty place, unreadable to anyone who did not know its history. Some years later I wrote a poem. I never dreamed that in 2010 I would be shown the entrance to a secret base in Mazury where Americans sequestered "special" prisoners.
MAJDANEK, APRIL 1973
It looks like any meadow. Sheep might safely
graze here, or lie oblivious to the April
drizzle. These buildings should be barns, or should
have been. But were. Terminology
will fail us: built for beasts, vacant now,
weathered to mellow brown they mutely stand
windowless, dark and blank. We wait in vain
to sense past horrors: even the barbed wire
coiled in the ditches glistens with raindrops
sweetening the tangled weeds. Pastoral thoughts
persist, until the future impinges on
the mind. Too quaint. Too picturesque, the place
is too available. Ready for use,
it stands. We would tear it down. But worse
to forget, some say. The residue of sin
colossal not original. There is
no remedy for past or future here:
only the think itself. We can make
nothing of it, forever.
(c) Multicultural Women Writers 1990
Senior Lecturer in the Department of English, has taught at Santa ClaraUniversity since 1986. She received her B.A. and M.A. in English, and her Ph.D. in American Literature and English Renaissance Drama from the University of Oregon.Her research interests include composition and creative nonfiction – particularly life writing and travel writing, as well as Jewish literature, including memoir and drama. Dr. Goodman has been involved for many years with S.C.U. International Programs, teaching four summers in the Durham, England, program, and one semester in the London FIE program. In the English Department, she advises students who plan to teach high school English. Related to an ongoing community learning project, she and several students created the Chelsea Literary Society, a women’s book group that gives university students the opportunity to mentor and learn from local first-generation high school students.
In 1984, one year out of my Ph.D. program and one month after getting married, I arrived in Poland with my husband, Bill. Family, friends, and folks at the synagogue thought we were crazy: conditions under the Soviets were dismal and Poland still seemed no place for Jews. But we wanted to see Poland, and I was excited to begin the Fulbright and work with the faculty and students at UMCS. Conditions were appalling, but the country was also beautiful and interesting. We made many wonderful friends, and with their help we learned how to navigate. I taught American literature – surveys, drama, and contemporary ethnic and women’s literature; I taught conversation classes and even American history. I found the UMCS students shy, reluctant to talk in class, respectful and very bright. I was struck by their eagerness to read the new texts and to see the current American films we brought from the embassy. And, of course, I learned from my students and colleagues, developing friendships and an interest in East European literature and Holocaust studies that continue today. Those two years in Lublin in the 1980’s were transformative for me and my family, and I feel deeply grateful to have had the opportunity.
In 2004-05, I was delighted to return to Lublin on a second Fulbright with my then 15 year-old daughter, Hannah. It was a new world in Poland, and exciting to see the changes. In some ways it was more like California: students and faculty were busy and stressed by the new pressures and opportunities. It was exciting to teach a new generation of Polish students, and fun to watch my daughter fall in love with Poland too. She made friends quickly and relished learning Polish. Indeed, Hannah’s decision to major in Slavic Studies at Barnard College was influenced by her experience in Lublin.
Professor of English and Director of Comparative Literature Studies at the University of Rhode Island, was the first Director of URI’s new Film Media major (2006-2009). He received his B.A. from Yale and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Northwestern University. His research grants and fellowships include an NEH Summer Seminar award at UCLA on television theory and most recently the biennial Hugh Le May Fellowship from Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa (2010). At URI his teaching and research areas focus on comparative literature, cultural studies, postmodernity, film and visual cultures, queer theory and gender studies; publications in these areas have appeared in journals such as SubStance, Contemporary Literature and South Atlantic Quarterly. In addition to the board of the Rhode Island International Film Festival, Prof. Leo serves an advisory editor or reader or factotum for The Americanist (ASC, Warsaw University), Brief (UMCS), and EJAS. Along with Prof. Marek Paryż (Warsaw) he has co-edited Projecting Words, Writing Images: Intersections of the Textual and the Visual in American Cultural Practices (2011) and with William Boelhower Working Sites: Texts, Territories and Cultural Capital in American Cultures (2004).
If a gift is an excess that keeps giving, then one doubly named is “Fulbright”-“UMCS.” The nonstop flow began in 1998 with an offer to be Poland’s very first Fulbright Distinguished Chair in American Studies / Literature and reappointment as Senior Scholar 1999-2000. It was a propitious matching: I went native with an exuberance and independent openness sustained by smartly inquisitive students and some of the most supportive, generous, and imaginative colleagues-cum-friends I have experienced and still do. With each immersion into Polish spaces and places I was learning wholly new reciprocities opening up daily life —practicing my Polish with pensioners on any number of trains, at the shops or “sklepy,” or in my immediate neighborhood pubs (and learning some very special slang!; tutoring a Lublin theater group in American pronunciation of Gombrowicz translations prior to their American tour; exploring the National Gallery and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Warsaw and a small art gallery on Lublin’s Krakowskie Przedmeście (where I purchased some haunting works on paper, e.g. Skórczewski; enjoying many evenings the treasures of home and local cooking; giving lectures on film, “punk aesthetics” or the 19th - century photographic sublime all over Poland (but also in Venice, Padua, Utrecht, Amsterdam, and Minsk); collaborating on curriculum development to meet the Bologna crediting processes, discussing MA theses and serving on a dozen defenses or working closely with PhD candidates; celebrating the “pagan” summer solstice in Lublin’s Stary Miasto and hearing uniquely Polish + Ukrainian + flolksy-jazzy-rock music; biking everywhere on a graciously loaned bike, e.g. to have collegial picnics at a lake; driving with a collection of colleagues—past folk art shrines on country roads—to off the beaten path gems such as Zamość, or to hidden, undeveloped pristine lakes to swim and BBQ kielbasa and chicken, or to another country village to catch a riveting “pagan” Grotowski-style “performance”). We all helped with the planning of the Fulbright Commission’s 40th birthday festival of seminars, performances, and exhibitions. Several of us wrote a proposal and succeeded in getting funding for Poland’s first GLBT international conference, an event repeated successfully for several years and which had a dramatic impact on gender studies or topics in several universities. Two of my many take aways (continuing) from Poland to RI was the development of new URI permanent courses, “Film and the Cold War” and “Advanced Topics in International Film.” My largest take away from my time at UMCS and what it still enables is the magnanimity of being and being among planetary citizens.
the second Fulbright exchange professor to MCSU, in Lublin, was born in Cadiz, Kentucky, in 1937, did his undergraduate work at the U. of Wisconsin, at Whitewater, and received his Ph.D. from the University of Washington. The Gillilands were in Janesville, Wisconsin in 1960-61, and from there they moved to California, where his wife Mary was a graduate student at UC Berkeley. In 1968, the Gillilands moved from California to Saskatoon, where Marshall began teaching in the English Department at the University of Saskatchewan.
In 1972, Marshall, Mary, and their nine-year-old son Sean left Canada for Poland, where Marshall taught American literature at MCSU. The secretary of the English Department at the University of Saskatchewan received two postcards from him from Lublin not long after his arrival. In a postcard to her dated September 19, 1972, he wrote, “If students [at the U. of Saskatchewan] are unhappy about their place in the university there they should see the students’ position here—remember the serfs? But there’s a difference between them [the serfs] and the students [at MCSU]. There is no whip; and there is plenty of cake to eat. Cryptic? Not really, but my mind runs in quirky circles.” He concluded, “Oh well, it can't help but be more pleasant soon. It’s an experience! Ta ta.” Marshall’s sense of isolation would have been heightened because travel to Lublin and eastern Poland by Americans was restricted at that time by the communist government. Fulbright exchange professors needed special dispensation to live and teach in Lublin.
When they returned to Canada, in 1973, the Gillilands brought back photos and slides of Poland as well as amber. A faculty member recalls his wearing the amber jewelry on social occasions. Marshall spent the remainder of his career at the University of Saskatchewan. He was among the first in his department to adopt the computer in his teaching, and he advocated its use for others in his profession in the journal Humanities. He was also a reviewer for the Canadian Review of American Studies. His wife Mary was a quilter, an environmentalist, and a birder, editing the book, The Birds of the Saskatoon Area. Marshall retired in June 1996 and passed away in November 2004, as Mary did in April 2010. Their son Sean, without whose help this entry could not have been written, is a Registered Nurse at the Royal University Hospital, in Saskatoon.
is an Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Colby College in Waterville, Maine. She has in the last decade shifted from teaching courses in American literature to teaching workshops in creative writing, both fiction and nonfiction. Her writing, too, now takes the form of short stories and personal essays. She has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her stories and essays have appeared in Southern Review, LaurelReview, North Dakota Quarterly, Christian Science Monitor, Chronicle of Higher Education, Eclipse, Red Rock Review, The Carolina Quarterly, Ascent,Witness (forthcoming), and PMS: Poemmemoirstory (forthcoming). She recently completed her first collection of short stories, The Pressure of Blood, which was selected as a finalist for this year’s Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and for the George Garrett Fiction Prize.
My Fulbright came at an exciting time: It was during 1980-81, the time of Solidarity’s ascent under the leadership of Lech Walesa. I remember the currents of exhilaration along with waves of anxiety swirling in the air. So many changes were happening so quickly. And at the same time there was daily life: the quest to purchase bananas in an increasingly depleted marketplace, the appearance of meat from a generous and helpful friend or acquaintance (unasked for, but always welcomed), dinner parties that were bountiful despite the shortages, filled above all with high spirited conversation and fun. Jurek Kutnik and Jurek and Joanna Durczak offered endless hospitality and help to us as we stumbled along with our handful of Polish words, and I remember with gratitude Jurek’s friend Staszek, who helped us repeatedly with the car repairs that we seemed all too often to need. I corresponded for some years after returning to the States with several of my graduate students in American literature and culture at MCSU, who were not only dedicated to their work, but also lovely people, generously inviting my husband and me into their homes. While the political events of the time were enormous in scope and resonance, what stays with me the most after thirty years are the warm feelings I have for the people we were so fortunate to meet in Lublin, people whose generosity and hospitality I have not—even with my increasingly leaky memory—forgotten.
educated as a generalist in language and literature at Louisiana State University, has taught both writing and imaginative literature for thirty years in the United States and Europe--Lublin, Roehampton, England, and Munich, Germany. She has published some fifty articles, primarily in the area of twentieth-century American fiction, as well as a writing text, THE FIFTY-MINUTE ESSAY. She was twice chosen as a participant in the National Endowment for the Humanities Seminars and Institutes in Southern Literature at Chapel Hill, North Carolina. She received the University System of Georgia’s Chancellor’s Award for Faculty study in the Czech Republic, and she helped establish a studies abroad program at Dalton State College. Dr. Butler retired from Dalton State in 2002 and continues writing, specifically, detective stories set in Poland shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall and featuring Fulbright Scholar Susanna Shepherd.
My time in Lublin was among the most memorable of my life. I had set my sights on a Fulbright appointment as a graduate student in the sixties, so the appointment in Lublin was the fulfillment of a longed-for scholarly adventure. I still see in my mind’s eye Joanna and Jurek Durczak meeting me at the train station, the golden autumn leaves filling the street gutters, the sudden sleet fall glistening on the sidewalks, the flowering chestnut tree. Sitting down to write every morning was exciting, whether preparing class or developing a conference presentation. I taught advanced English conversation, a survey of American Literature, and a couple of fresh offerings, a lecture course on the beginnings of Southern Literature as a specialization and a seminar on the twentieth-century Southern Novel. While many of my students were reticent, most were eager, well-read, and some, like Pawel Frelik, were well ahead of me in critical theory. With encouragement from the Durczaks and Prof. Agnieszka Salska of Lodz (and without the distractions of a television or telephone) I found time to write and present papers in Skierniewice, Poznan, Kazimierz, and in Chantilly, France. Yes, it was a most productive adventure among colleagues I remember warmly and hope to see again.
the first Fulbrighter in Lublin, earned a B.A. and M.A. from Wesleyan University, in Connecticut, and a Ph. D. from Yale University. His dissertation Theodore Dreiser: The Flesh and the Spirit, places the Indiana novelist in the prophetic tradition, as more of a religious than a naturalist writer. Dr. Forrey taught English and American Studies at the University of Hartford, San Diego State University, and the New York State University at Potsdam, where he was chair of the English Department. He was Academic Vice President at Bradford College, in Bradford, Massachusetts, and following his Fulbright year in Poland, he was Coordinator of the Yale-based Bicentennial Committee on International Conferences of Americanists, traveling throughout the world helping to organize conferences on the occasion of the American Bicentennial. For the last twenty-two years he has lived in Portsmouth, Ohio, where he taught English and American literature at Ohio’s newest university, Shawnee State University, where he served four terms as president of the faculty union. Since 2004, he has written a political blog called River Vices http://rivervices.blogspot.com as well as a poetry blog, Poems Old & New http://xpalidosis.blogspot.com.
Since educational and cultural exchange was one of the things that helped end the Cold War, I am proud to have been the first Fulbrighter to Lublin, especially since it was at the university named after a woman I admire, Marie Curie-Sklodowska. Though it was not without its difficulties, my experience in Poland enriched my life. My son Christopher was born in Lublin on June 8, 1972, in a hospital close to Majdanek, about which I published a poem in Poland Illustrated Magazine (July 1972). I later reflected about my Fulbright experience in “An American in Lublin,” which appeared in International Educational and Cultural Exchange in the summer of 1974. In 2000, I returned with my son to Lublin to deliver a talk to students that my hosts billed as “The First Fulbrighter in Lublin.” I wrote “Lublin: A Memoir,” in preparation for that talk. A personal account, the short memoir included several poems I wrote during and after my Fulbright year. One of those poems was about the woman whose statue looms over the university named after her. When it comes to adversity, Poles are pros. They have had much practice. They are survivors because they are strivers. No Pole better illustrates the truth of that observation than Marie Curie-Sklodowska.
Dissolving in Light: M. Curie-Sklodowska
“Sweet are the uses of adversity.”
Shakespeare
The mystic substance kept on calling her
Back to the damp, cold shed provided
By the stingy French bureaucracy.
She wrote later, “But what of that? We must
Have perseverance and above all
Confidence in ourselves. We must believe
We are gifted for something and that
This thing, at whatever cost, must be attained.”
Her husband, Pierre, was just as determined.
“Whatever happens, even if one has to
Go on like a body without a soul,
One must work just the same,” he wrote.
They worked the way the Trappists prayed—day and night—
She stirring a bubbling vat of evil-looking pitchblende
In the yard, foul smoke darkening the sky,
He making calculations in the shed.
She brought him back one night to see the stuff
Glowing mystically in the glass containers—
It was a night she always remembered.
With hands ruined by radium, she carried on
After he was crushed on the Rue Dauphine
By a wagon loaded with uniforms.
Like a Polish peasant in her garden,
She moved each day for years among the glass
Vials blooming beautifully in the lab,
Handling them gently with hands that would
Not heal, with faith that would not die, the world
For which she gladly worked herself to death
Dissolving in light, burning to marrow.
Robert Forrey, 1972
is Byler Professor of English (Emeritus) at the University of Central Missouri. He also taught at the University of Pittsburgh, Budapest University where he directed a USIA program, Jagiellonian University (Senior Fulbright 1987-88), and the University of Rzeszow as Professor of American Literature. In addition, he served as Department Chair at Rockingham CC, Dean of the Graduate School at the University of Central Missouri and at Eastern Illinois University, and Dean of Academic Affairs at St. Mary’s College-Detroit. Gladsky is a former President of the Missouri Philological Society and the Polish American Historical Association, and the founder of the Illinois Philological Association. He has twice received the Oskar Halecki Award from the Polish American Historical Association for “important books on the Polish Experience in the United States” and the Mieczyslaw Haiman Award for “sustained contribution to the study of Poles in America.”
Professor Gladsky has authored more than fifty scholarly writings on new historicism and the American historical novel and on literary ethnicity with focus on the Polish experience in American letters, including Princes, Peasants, and Other Polish Selves: Ethnicity in American Literature (U Mass Press), Something of My Very Own to Say: American Women Writers of Polish Descent, T. Gladsky and R. Gladsky (East European Monographs), and Ethnicity, Culture, City: Polish Americans in the USA, 1870-1950, T. Gladsky and A.Walaszek (Oficyna Naukowa Warszawa). He has lectured and presented papers at universities and conferences throughout the United States and Europe not the least of which include numerous lectures at universities and colleges throughout Poland.
After thirty years, it is tempting to romanticize my first Fulbright experience at UMCS in 1981-82, by saying obligingly that all my Polish colleagues were helpful and collegial, that the students were industrious and hard-working, that the university was a model of organization and high-mindedness, that Poles were divinely inspired, and that I was a teacher-scholar extraordinaire with a profound sensitivity for the Polish experience. Hardly so. Academically, little occurred that year in the way of reading, writing, and teaching. Strikes, lockouts, martial law, post martial law depression, and a rather frantic struggle to survive took up everyone’s time. I was insufficiently acquainted with Polish history and culture, never quite understood the workings of the Institute, and spent too much time chasing rainbows and potatoes. The mysteries of Polish socialism baffled us daily – me, my courageous wife, Rita (emergency appendectomy), and our two little girls, Kristen and Jennifer who studied Polish at Catholic University. But we miss the compassion of that period and still prefer the old Poland in many ways. Would I have exchanged that year for a large pot of gold? Not a chance. Thirty years later, I see the faces of my students and my good friend Professor Lyra in the hall at the institute. I hear our too-good -to-be-true next door neighbors, the Rodkiewiczs, on Ulica Langiewicza. I walk the streets of Lublin and shiver in the mid afternoon winter dark waiting for a tram, and I watch people in the perplexing and tedious food lines. I hope my subsequent work represents a small payment in exchange for the life-enhancing experience my family had in Lublin in 1981-82.
Professor Steven Carter’s research focuses on Postmodern Studies, Literature and Technology and Contemporary American Lit. He is the author of seventeen books published in America and Europe; winner of numerous literary awards, including the Schachterle Prize, UNESCO's Nuove Lettre International Poetry and Literature Award (twice), and the Eric Hoffer Foundation's Montaigne Medal.
I arrived in Lublin just in time for the free elections of October 27, 1991, so that was a thrill for me. At UMCS I was delighted to find my students were, on the whole, better writers of English than my own students at home. Lublin, too, was a delight – I especially enjoyed taking autumn walks down the Krakowskie Przedmieście to Old Town and the Lublin Castle. It was also my privilege to give a series of Fulbright lectures on postmodernism up the street at the Catholic University.
- a poet, teacher and founder of the now-defunct John O'Hara Journal. The author of The Only Survivor and Other Poems. Now retired – working on a novel.
I had a wonderful year in Lublin because of students, colleagues, and the Polish people. Many fond memories. Plus 250+ Polish posters, several oil paintings and lithos. I wish I had stayed a second year.
in 2000 retired as a Professor of Theatre Arts at the University of Arizona and as an Adjunct Professor of Native American Studies at the University of New Mexico. He is also a retired U.S. Navy Captain (06). He has written and published poems, plays, articles, and book reviews, and he has worked professionally as an actor, a playwright, and a stage director. Since retirement he has taken up the life of a bon vivant and world traveler who writes personal travel accounts for the reading enjoyment of his friends and family.
My Fulbright year at UMCS in Lublin was the high point of my academic career. I thoroughly enjoyed the company of my colleagues and students, many of whom remain friends to this day. My students and I formed a theatre troupe, The Back End of the Donkey Theatre Company, and we produced my play, Mother McFadden, for our friends at UMCS and presented the play at the 10th Festival of Drama in English in Gdansk in April 1995. We also published at UMCS a student-written literary journal. I also had the opportunity to present lectures at Warsaw University, Rzeszow Teacher’s College, Zamosc Teacher’s College, Catholic University of Lublin, the American Consulate in Krakow, and at Jagiellonian University in Krakow. I also presented papers at conferences in Pulawy, Torun, and Lodz. A wonderful, busy and exciting year!
received his B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Montana and his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto. In addition to his book Faulkner’s Fables of Creativity, he has published essays or chapters on the medieval drama, Shakespeare, Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, Virginia Woolf, and others. His current research interests include Shakespeare’s Lancastrian Tetralogy and the influence of Shakespeare on twentieth-century American literature.
They say that a Fulbright award is a once-in-a-lifetime experience, so I feel incredibly fortunate to have had it become a thrice-in-a-lifetime experience for me, and especially to have had all three appointments in the English Department at UMCS. I initially received a Fulbright Distinguished Chair appointment in 2002, and found it to be such a rich and rewarding experience that I not only returned as a Distinguished Chair during the 2010-2011 academic year, but also applied for and received a Fulbright renewal at UMCS for 2011-2012. Although I did my homework before arriving in 2002, having read some books on Poland and having explored UMCS and its English Department via the web, I was not prepared for the extraordinary warmth and many, many kindnesses I’ve received while in Poland. I’ve found Poles typically to be hospitable and helpful, and this is especially true of those in the UMCS American Literature and Culture Department, whose congeniality and collegiality have proven to be nothing short of astounding. My stay at UMCS has been a splendid part of my life and of my career as an academic: I teach the courses I proposed, on the schedule I requested; the Department has provided a very comfortable apartment which looks out onto a park and is literally a two-minute walk from campus; my colleagues have been extremely generous with their time both professionally and personally; my students are fluent in English and are used to hard work in their classes; and the two “shepherdesses” I’ve had have both been gems. I literally could not have asked for more, and I would have been perfectly satisfied with much less. I very briefly and solely for the sake of variety considered applying elsewhere for my second Fulbright, but given my terrific experience at UMCS in 2002, I couldn’t see any reason other than mere variety for doing so. Consequently, I applied to return to the English Department at UMCS. Looking back now as my second appointment is (too) rapidly coming to its close, I’m absolutely certain that I made the right decision.
doctoral work was in American literature, particularly 19th and 20th century, and those periods make up most of his literature offerings for the English department. However, approximately half of his teaching is in writing courses, and in recent years his professional work has been largely in the area of rhetoric. He published a textbook in 1997 (Rhetoric through Media), and has presented regularly at the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) and other professional conferences. In 1982-83 he was one of SVSU's first two Fulbright Professors, accepting an appointment at Marie Curie-Sklodowska University (UMCS) in Lublin, Poland, and he received a second Fulbright to teach in 1987-88 at University of Gdańsk. He has drawn on those experiences to develop general education courses in Central European literature. Recent research interests are focused on performance studies as connected with both rhetoric and literature.
I was fortunate enough to be selected as UMCS’s Fulbrighter early in my university career, 1982-84, and could watch at first hand as university faculty who became my close friends held together and did their work in evil times. Solidarność had been driven underground by the General in the Sunglasses, there were demonstrations at Plac Lubelski on selected historical dates, meat was rationed, the air was thick with coal and diesel smoke, but what mattered was somehow to move ahead with culture and learning despite all that. My then-young friends have become your senior faculty: Ola Kędzierska, who courageously showed me so much of what I wouldn't otherwise have known about Poland; Irmina Wawrzyczek, selected as my “shepherd” but still gracious and wonderfully humorous; Jurek Kutnik, ambitious and wryly humorous; Zbigniew Mazur, who was at the time a 5th-year student; the imperious and gracious Jola Szpyra; and Joanna and Jerzy Durczak, warm and intellectual and kind. Others I knew less well are still active presences in the English Institute. The post-’89 generation has—like Americans—the luxury to be apolitical and even ahistorical. Someone I spoke with at the time, when asked about emigration, told me that “We want what you have there, but here.” Nearly 30 years later, that is accomplished, and it has been my privilege to see both the before and the after.
An Associate Professor of English at Nassau Community College,
specializes in science fiction and Animal Studies. She is a former president of the Science Fiction Research Association, an editor for the journals Science Fiction Studies and Humanimalia and the co-editor of Blood Read: The Vampire as Metaphor in Contemporary Culture (1997) and Edging Into the Future: Science Fiction as Contemporary Cultural Transformation (2002).
I spent the academic year of 2008-2009 as a Fulbright Distinguished Chair in American Studies at MCSU, quite a change from my usual job as a professor of English at Nassau Community College in New York. While I was there I had the blissful opportunity to teach only science fiction: a general course in American sf, one in feminist sf, and one in animal studies and sf. Not only was this a blissful experience because I loved the works I was teaching but it was also blissful because my students at UMCS were a pleasure to teach: enthusiastic, resourceful, funny, and smart. In addition, my colleagues at UMCS not only provided me with much stimulating conversation but with warm friendships as well. I especially appreciated working with the graduate students, listening to their presentations, discussing their research, offering suggestions, and learning from them. I don’t ordinarily get such an opportunity to share ideas and theories in my field on an everyday basis as I did at UMCS, much less learn valuable lessons on local culture—including such vital aspects as cakes and fashion. Indeed, my only complaint about my time in Lublin has to do with the wintertime slush, something I’d have only faced here in New York.
is a full professor of English at Tennessee Tech University in Cookeville, Tennessee. His teaching and research interests include modern American literature, with emphasis on poetry and short fiction; western literature in translation; and creative writing. One particular topic of interest is the literature of social and political conscience, particularly authors and artists who speak out against injustice and oppression. In 2008, with the help of Dr Halina Ablamowicz, among others, he translated Czechowicz’s “Poemat o Lublinie” / “Poem about Lublin” for posting on the Czechowicz website. In 2009 the bi-lingual edition of the Selected Poems of Andrzej Bursa was published in Kraków.
Thanks to both students and faculty my Fulbright year at UMCS was truly stimulating and rewarding. I looked forward to each class meeting to learn what reactions to and interpretations of the assigned readings my Polish students had to offer, and I was impressed by their diligence, motivation, and intelligence. Outside the classroom I explored the Starówka’s maze of narrow streets, the castle with its gorgeous chapel, museums and churches, the skansen, and even the sprawling open-air market down at the bus station. Day trips to Kazimierz dolny, Zamość, Chelm, and the magnificent Kożłówka palace expanded my knowledge and appreciation of eastern Poland’s history and beauty. On a somber note, my visits to Majdanek proved to be as just as moving as those I made to Auschwitz-Birkenau in previous years. Thank you, UMCS and Lublin!
is Professor Emeritus at Wright State University in Dayton Ohio. Professor Hussman specializes in American literary naturalism. Among his published books are Dreiser and His Fiction: A Twentieth-Century Quest, Harbingers of a Century: The Novels of Frank Norris, Counterterrorist, and Danger’s Disciple. He has also edited Love That Will Not Let Me Go, Marguerite Tjader’s memoir about her time with Dreiser. Professor Hussman’s numerous articles deal with a wide range of American fiction and film. He is currently finishing a book about desire and disillusionment in American literature.
I taught at UMCS on Fulbright grants and independently for several years between 2000 and 2007. During those years I also taught at the University of Warsaw. I regard my time teaching at UMCS as among the most fulfilling experiences of my long career. I found Polish students and those in Lublin particularly to be dedicated, energetic, and impressively intelligent.
works as Professor and Graduate Director of American Studies at California State University, Fullerton. He is responsible for a large MA program and teaches courses on American character, American regionalism, California and the West, American folk culture, culture and nature, environmental theory and history, and the interpretation of natural and built environments. Partially inspired by his Fulbright experience at UMCS Lublin, he is just now completing a collection of essays on the politics of place, Regionalists on the Left: Radical Voices from the American West. He has co-authored several other books including: Region and Regionalism in the United States (1988), Mapping American Culture (1992), and Many Wests: Place, Culture, and Regional Identity (1997), and he has published prize-winning articles on the significance of Frederick Jackson Turner’s regional theory and on the architectural imagery of Walt Disney’s Frontierland. With his Fulbright experiences in mind and as the director of an MA program with 50 or more students, he has actively promoted transnational American Studies since the 1990s. In 2006, he was extremely gratified to receive a national award from the American Studies Association: the Mary C. Turpie Award for outstanding achievement in teaching, advisement, and program building in American Studies.
I vividly remember my time at UMCS in Lublin as a high point of my career. It has been one of the great honors of my life to serve as Distinguished Fulbright Chair of American Studies at the University of Debrecen in Hungary 1998-99 and at UMCS In Lublin in Spring 2004, and I was particularly moved by the personal warmth, never-ending thoughtfulness, and intellectual zest of the American studies faculty and students at UMCS. In my five months in Lublin, I know that I learned more from my colleagues and students than they learned form me. I taught three memorable seminars—on California Cultures, American Culture and Nature, and American Regionalism—to some of the smartest, liveliest, most appreciative students I’ve ever had in a classroom. I exchanged ideas with advanced graduate students and had unforgettable, wide-ranging conversations with truly accomplished, expansively warm colleagues—incredibly generous souls like Jerzy and Joanna Durczak, Jerzy Kutnik, Pawel Frelik, and Mirella Dykiel.
At a personal level, I was deeply touched by how often colleagues took me into their homes, invited me to dinner, social events, and academic conferences. I was moved by how they indulged my fascination with local culture and nature, history and landscape, by taking me on tours and walks through vivid places like Naleczow, Kazimierz Dolny, Zamocs, Zwierzyniec, Sochy, and Roztoczanski national park. Largely because of my UMCS colleagues, I gave papers at Torun, Krakow, Prague, and Lodz, and these talks and trips through history--soaked landscapes have shaped my teaching and writing ever since. Memories of reading Isaac Bashevis Singer’s novels, for example, while traveling through the very towns and villages being described in his prose—such an experience and many others like are etched in my memory. I am forever grateful for all that I gained during my 2004 Fulbright at UMCS in Lubin.
is the author of In Which Brief Stories Are Told (short stories, Wayne State University Press 2011), Mutual Shores (poetry, New Issues 2000) and three chapbook-length series of poems: Abeyance (winner of the Frank Cat Press Chapbook Award 2007), Quatrains(Pudding House 2006), and Significant Others (Main Street Rag 2005). The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, two Senior Fulbright Lectureships, and a P.E.N. Syndicated Fiction Award, he is also the editor of Imported Breads: Literature of Cultural Exchange (Mammoth 2003) and founding coordinator of the Literature In Person (LIP) Reading Series at Ferris State University (Michigan), where he has taught writing and literature since 1987.
In my tenure as Senior Fulbright Lecturer at Marie Curie-Sklodowskiej during the 1997-98 academic year, I conducted a thesis seminar in Twentieth Century Literature, led specialization courses in Contemporary American Poetry and American Literature (1945-1995), and taught an advanced writing class. Beyond my academic responsibilities at UMCS, I traveled extensively throughout Poland (with Sarah and Andrew, the two of my children who lived with me at the time) offering lectures on American poetry and culture to students and faculty at Opole, Lodz, Gdansk, Krakow, and Zamosc. A direct result of my Fulbright experience is Imported Breads: Literature of Cultural Exchange, an anthology of poems, stories, and memoirs by writers who spent extended periods of time in foreign countries as Fulbright scholars or researchers (including Gary Gildner and Donald Morrill, former Poland grantees). Another result of my experience at UMCS can be found in my essay “The Poet as Travel Guide: Notes on ‘Ozymandias’,” which appeared in The Writer’s Chronicle (Feb 2010). I have fond memories of my year in Lublin, which was my children’s favorite city in Poland.
teaches creative nonfiction and poetry writing in the Master of Fine Arts program at Minnesota State University, Mankato, where he is a Distinguished Faculty Scholar. His books include two collections of poems, Almost Dark and Coming Late to Rachmaninoff, winner of the Minnesota Book Award; as well as two books of creative nonfiction, Fakebook: Improvisations onf a Journey Back to Jazz and Saturday Night in Baoding: A China Memoir, winner of the Associated Writing Programs Award for nonfiction. He has held Fulbright professorships in China and Korea, in addition to Poland. He works as a jazz saxophone player.
My experience in Lublin was a positive one. At UMCS I worked with the best students I’ve had anywhere in the world – bright, conscientious, well read. My accomodations were comfortable, and the city and campus setting are very pleasant. My wife and I hope to return some day. Thanks to UMCS!
– university lecturer, author, U.S. Fulbright Scholar, producer, recording artist, and performer – is a versatile academician and musician with a proven track record of excellence. He holds a Ph.D. in Musicology from the prestigious Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, California. A renowned performer worldwide and as a specialist in American music, Dr. Breckenridge effectively combines his academic and music experiences in presenting engaging lectures and dynamic performances to numerous audiences in places like France, Hong Kong, Hungary, Japan, U.K., Poland, and many cities throughout the United States.
My academic assignment in the American Studies Department at Marie Curie Sklodowskiej University (UMCS) entailed teaching about American identity by lecturing on various aspects of African American culture and its relationship within mainstream American society. I was able to accomplish the objective of my assignment, and I had the delightful opportunity to discuss more intrinsic aspects of the subject matter. My opportunity to do this is due in part to students' eagerness to learn about African American culture and its role in American identity. The American Studies Department at UMCS was more than willing to accommodate me by coordinating their departmental course offerings with my teaching specialization. The department also allowed me to offer a non-required informal setting of learning where I showed various films pertinent to my course offerings. (Some of the films included Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Birth of a Nation, Showboat, Black Like Me, The Wiz, and many others).
For my lectures, students came prepared having read and examined Powerpoint presentations of each topic. In my humble opinion, I attribute this to the excellent faculty in the American Studies department, who I personally witnessed as being a department dedicated to academic excellence. Moreover, with respect to communication in English, my American Studies majors were well-prepared to read, understand, and articulate in English at the university level - another attribute and advantage of the American Studies department. Through my teaching I discovered that Polish university students, particularly American Studies majors, are intrigued by American society during the 1960s. By virtue of my presence as a Fulbright Scholar, not to mention being the first African American Fulbrighter in Lublin, Poland, there are some inherent differences in teaching Polish students. Without question, students are more attentive here as the result of this extremely unique educational opportunity provided by the combined efforts of the Polish and United States governments.
The Department of American Studies at UMCS provided me with incalculable professional and social guidance. They were extremely gracious to my family by arranging social gatherings nearly every weekend. Without a doubt this department stands at the top of my list among departments who are very friendly, hospitable, and interested in working with American scholars.
is a Professor of Literature and Director of the Women’s and Ethnic Studies Program at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. She is a published poet and the author of a number of critical essays on writers ranging from Charlotte Brontë and Marguerite Duras to Cristina García; and editor of the essay collection Family Matters in the British and American Novel and the literary collection A Secret Weavers Anthology, which features the work of contemporary Latin American women writers. Her most recent work is a monograph titled Cuban Artists across the Diaspora: Setting the Tent Against the House, which focuses on the traveling exhibition CAFÉ.
As for my tenure in Lublin, it was perhaps one of the most significant experiences of my life. In truth, I was overwhelmed by the kindness and the generosity of my colleagues and students and the friends I made in the community. I also valued our many conversations about nationhood and cultural identity as I was exploring this same topic in my own critical writing regarding the Cuban diaspora. Our conversations regarding the relationships among culture, history, and spatiality, and the manner in which individuals and groups self-affiliate were particularly memorable.
- the Director of the Center for Chicano Studies and a Professor of Drama at University of California, Santa Barbara. He teaches classes in playwriting and U.S. Latino Theatre. He is a well-known playwright, the author of e.g. Children of the Sun: Scenes and Monologues For Latino Youth, Rancho Hollywood y otras obras del teatro chicano (1999), and Dreaming on a Sunday in the Alameda (2004).
Lublin... UMCS... Memories, memories.... One notable impression was my students correcting me when I referred to Poland as being in "Eastern Europe," they insisted "Poland is in CENTRAL Europe." The other thing that struck me was how all the students had British accent and would use words like "mate, bonnet, and boot" (referring to the car). My American accent felt odd, somehow! Living on Langiewicza Street one block from the university I remember the elderly lady in the apartment next to ours always playing "Radio Maryja" extremely loud. I had to ask my "shepherd" Annia to write her a note asking her to "please turn it down!" But mostly I recall with fondness the wonderful faculty and students I met at UMCS.
received his Ph.D. (1999) and M.A. (1996) from Ohio University (OU), where he earned two awards for rhetorical scholarship and was named Graduate Student of the Year in 1998. He is currently an associate professor in the Department of Communication at the College of Charleston, where he has taught since fall 2002. His teaching repertoire includes courses in communication ethics, media criticism, rhetoric, and communication theory, with a focus upon American popular culture. In his research Westerfelhaus applies critical, rhetorical, and semiotic theories to communication issues related to ethics, religion, and American popular culture. He has presented more than 50 conference papers and has published articles in Critical Studies in Media Communication, Communication Quarterly, and other journals. He has also published chapters in several edited volumes, including Rhetorical Criticism: Exploration and Practice (4th ed.), Critical Approaches to Television (2nd ed.), and Communicating Ethnic and Cultural Identity.
It is hard to believe that a little over a year has passed since I left Lublin. I am still in attempting to process my experience as a Fulbright instructor and integrate what I have learned. Indeed, the time I spent at UMCS was a period of discovery that has enriched me personally and professionally. Many of my "discoveries" are the products of interactions with my UMCS students and faculty colleagues as well other Polish friends from Bialystok, Kielce, Lublin, and Wroclaw, whom I met through social and professional networks developed at UMCS. Naturally, I learned a great deal from these students, colleagues, and friends about Polish culture, food, geography, history, politics, religion, and - most especially - the Polish people. As a result, I developed an appetite for Polish cuisine, and often crave it. I expanded my appreciation of Polish classical music beyond the few Chopin pieces I knew to embrace works by Górecki, Kilar, and Szymanowski, to name only a few composers. With great interest I also explored Polish literature ranging from Mickiewicz to Milosz. Reading this literature opened up whole new worlds to me: aesthetic, cultural, narrative, and philosophical. This reading has paid dividends with respect to my teaching. For example, in the Ethics and Communication class I teach at the College of Charleston I have assigned group research projects regarding such Polish philosophers as Leszek Kolakowski, with good results. Other experiences have also influenced my teaching. I expanded the ethics course material regarding the Holocaust to include what I learned through visits to Auschwitz, Majdanek, and other concentration camps; to former Jewish neighborhoods and ghettos in Bialystok, Lódz, Lublin, etc.; to museums in Lublin and Warszawa; and at a Holocaust seminar I attended in Kielce.
Lublin is nicely situated to explore Poland and Central Europe. This allowed me to participate in conferences in Bialystok, Kielce, Lódz, Lublin, Pulawy, and Warszawa; to give invited talks at universities in Bialystok, Kielce, Lublin, L'viv (Ukraine), and Wroclaw; and to visit Bratislava (Slovakia), Budapest (Hungary), and Prague (Czech Republic). I was able to travel for pleasure throughout Poland, sometimes on my own (Czestochowa, Kraków, Oswiecim, Poznan), at times with Jurek Durczak (Kazimierz Dolny, Zamosc), and other times with Jurek Kutnik (Chelm, Kozlówka, Wlodawa). These trips are treasured memories. As a visiting professor, I did my best to expose my students at UMCS to aspects of American culture about which they might have been unaware, and to help them understand American culture by providing them with knowledge of such theoretical constructs as the American monomyth. I hope they learned something useful from my efforts. I can certainly say I learned a great deal from them. Indeed, the questions they asked, the observations they made, and the insights they provided regarding American literature, history, and popular culture taught me a great deal about my own culture. I continue to have correspondence with some of my students. I also learned much about America from conversations about literature with Jurek and Joanna Durczak; with Jurek Kutnik regarding music (and just about everything else); with Pawel Frelik concerning comics books, science fiction, and video games; and conversations with other UMCS colleagues. My experiences while at UMCS have widened my perspective and deepened my understanding of myself, others, and the world we share. While at UMCS I developed valued professional and personal relationships that will last a lifetime. In addition to the colleagues and friends discussed above I should mention Ewa Antoszek, Anna Bendrat, and Edyta Frelik, who - like their senior colleagues - were wonderfully hospitable and did much to make me feel at home. I value the time I spent teaching at UMCS and hope I will have the opportunity to teach there again at some point in the future.
