Contact: Patrick O’Donnell, English, (517) 355-7575; or Kristan Tetens, University Relations, (517) 355-5633, tetenskr@msu.edu

3/29/2005

EAST LANSING, Mich. – Patrick O’Donnell, professor of English and chairperson of the Department of English at Michigan State University, has been named one of 36 winners in the 2005-06 Fulbright Distinguished Chairs Program. He will hold the Walt Whitman Chair in American Culture Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands, from September to December.

Awards in the Fulbright Distinguished Chairs Program are among the most prestigious appointments in the Fulbright Scholar Program. Recipients are senior scholars with significant publication and teaching records.

At Radboud University Nijmegen, O’Donnell will teach undergraduate and graduate courses on contemporary literature and film. He will also deliver lectures on contemporary literature at other venues in the Netherlands and in Germany, France and Ukraine. He plans to work on two research projects while in the Netherlands, one on voyeurism and modernity, the other an edited volume of essays on teaching William Faulkner's “As I Lay Dying” for the Modern Language Association’s “Approaches to Teaching” series. 

“This will be my second opportunity to serve as a Fulbright professor, and I look forward to interacting with European colleagues and students and to spending some time wholly devoted to writing and teaching,” O’Donnell said.

O’Donnell joined the MSU faculty in 1997. He holds a doctorate from the University of California, Davis. His research and teaching interests include modern and postmodern American literature, theory, history and theory of narrative, and film.

The Fulbright Program is America’s flagship international educational exchange activity and is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Established in 1946 under congressional legislation introduced by the late Sen. J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, the program is designed “to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries.”