MyGlasgow News

This academic year, The University will welcome two new Fulbright Scholars to Glasgow for one year as part of the Fulbright Commissions’ UK-US exchange programme.

William Boyce is an English, Creative Writing and Religious Studies graduate from Florida State University. Whilst at the University he will be studying theological aesthetics at the Centre for the Study of Literature, Theology, and the Arts while pursuing a Masters of Literature.

Liam Riordan is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maine. He will be arriving in the Spring of 2012 to will teach an Honours course on the early American Republic and participate in its School of Humanities’ active graduate programme in early American history.

Fulbright is commonly recognised as the most prestigious international exchange programme in the world. From its inception, the Fulbright Commission has fostered bilateral relationships between the US and other countries and governments.

Fulbright Exchanges currently operate in 155 countries around the world, and since the Commission’s foundation in the aftermath of World War II, it has facilitaetd the exchange of more than 300,000 people from around the world. To date there have been 28 former Fulbright Scholars who have at one time served as head of a state or government, 43 Nobel Prize winners, and 78 Pulitzer Prize winners.

This UK-US Commission is open to applications from senior academics, researchers, postgraduate students from any accredited institution, they also run Summer Institutes for undergraduates. The Scholarships are awarded to outstanding candidates who not only stand out in their respective academic fields, but those who also have a rich track record of participation in extra-curricular activities, and who have demonstrable ambassadorial skills.

Former members of the UK-US Commission include: Milton Friedman, Sylvia Plath, Ian Rankin and Charles Kennedy.

 

 William Boyce was born in Providence, Rhode Island, and graduated from Florida State University (FSU) in 2011, with an Honours BA in History, English-Creative Writing, and Religious Studies. Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude, he composed a 50-page collection of poems for his Honours in the Major Thesis under the mentorship of a Guggenheim Fellow. He was a Founding Father of Pi Kappa Phi Fraternity, a founding member of The Owl, Florida State’s only undergraduate research journal, and the founder of Honours Delegates, which hosts special events for prospective FSU Honours students.

As the Humanities representative on the Student Council for Undergraduate Research and Creativity, he also served as a resident assistant in a freshman hall and presented research at the Atlantic Coast Conference Meeting of the Minds Symposium. As a Fulbright Scholar at the University ofGlasgow, he will study theological aesthetics at their Centre for the Study of Literature, Theology, and the Arts while pursuing a Masters of Literature.

 

 Liam Riordan is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maine. While a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Glasgow in spring 2012 he will teach an Honours course on the early American republic and participate in its School of Humanities’ active graduate programme in early American history. He will also conduct archival research for a project that seeks to integrate three disparate areas of scholarship about the Scottish Atlantic (in the Chesapeake, the British West Indies, and British North America, ie, Canada) from 1760 to 1820. His wife and two sons will join him in Glasgow.

Professor Riordan’s first book, Many Identities, One Nation (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), examined multiculturalism in the Philadelphia region from 1770 to 1830. He co-edited The Loyal Atlantic: Remaking the British Atlantic in the Revolutionary Era (University of Toronto Press, 2011). He is currently completing a comparative biographyabout five loyalists who lived all around the Atlantic World as a result of their opposition to the American Revolution.

 

 

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First published: 6 July 2011