International honors: Thomas Glave receives a Fulbright, honorary professorship in the UK

Binghamton University English Professor Thomas Glave is a master of words, weaving them together into compelling stories and essays.

But he couldn’t quite make sense of the email he received on April 8.

He knew he was a finalist for a Fulbright award, but didn’t expect to receive it. After all, he received a Fulbright to study in Jamaica 23 years ago and this kind of honor seldom strikes twice. Add in his request to study in the United Kingdom — the program’s most popular destination country — and he was primed for polite refusal. The email, he figured, must be a standard rejection letter.

“I read it, and I kept looking for where it said, ‘We’re sorry to tell you that….’ I said, ‘It’s got to be in there somewhere. Why can’t I find it?’” he remembered with a laugh. “I spent a couple of days in disbelief.”

He printed it out for closer scrutiny and the message finally sunk in: he got his second Fulbright award.

During the 2021-22 academic year, he will be researching and writing his sixth book — on a topic “which will be revealed eventually,” he said — at the University of Nottingham. And that’s not his only international honor: Glave was also named an honorary professor at the University of Liverpool, where he is the 2021 writer-in-residence at their Centre for New and International Writing.

He had given guest lectures at Liverpool in 2014, when he was a visiting professor at another U.K. school, the University of Warwick. He stayed in touch, and has presented master classes there this year in postcolonial literature, race and racism in fiction, and creative writing.

Glave’s first Fulbright experience brought him to Jamaica, where he worked and studied for a year before joining the Binghamton faculty. It still shapes his life and career more than two decades later; he expects this latest Fulbright will be similarly transformative.

“There is an incredible opportunity for cultural exchange,” Glave explained. “People who receive the fellowship are, in a way, ambassadors of goodwill. (The fellowships) really encourage an openness to exchange and exploration.”

He frequently goes to the United Kingdom to conduct research, and is also an associate editor for a literary journal there called Wasafiri. Due to the pandemic, he has been working remotely.

Like many professors, he misses the joys of teaching on campus, but he has discovered the positive side of the ubiquitous web-conferencing platform. This past year, Zoom has made events much more accessible to audiences who might not otherwise attend in person.

“We have seen that it’s really possible to do all kinds of things internationally, even from far-flung places that wouldn’t be possible ordinarily,” he said. “It’s been really powerful.”