Ashtabula Campus Professor Joins the Ranks of Fulbright Scholars

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Roger Craik, associate professor of English at the Ashtabula Campus, has been awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to teach at Sofia University, in Bulgaria, in spring 2007.

Roger Craik, associate professor of English at the Ashtabula Campus, has been awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to teach at Sofia University, in Bulgaria, in spring 2007.

He will teach two courses while there: Modernism to undergraduates and Contemporary British Poetry to master's students.

Craik is both delighted and surprised to have been awarded the Fulbright. "I so enjoyed Sofia when I was there last year, with its stately university with marble banisters and old wooden desks, not to mention the art galleries and cheap coffee houses, and the friendly faculty and students” he said. “But I was astonished to be awarded the Fulbright.”

Fulbright grants are made to U.S. citizens and nationals of other countries for a variety of educational activities, primarily university lecturing, advanced research, graduate study and teaching in elementary and secondary schools. Since the program’s inception, more than 273,500 participants — chosen for their leadership potential — have had the opportunity to observe each other’s political, economic and cultural institutions.

This will be Craik’s second professional visit to Bulgaria. In summer 2005 he was invited to give lectures in Sofia and in Veliko Turnovo on the British poet Philip Larkin. He also read his own poetry there. It was on the strength of these readings that the Sofia department invited him to apply for the Fulbright Scholarship.

He has worked at the Ashtabula Campus since 1991 and enjoys his teaching there. Born and raised in England, he was educated at the universities of Reading and Southampton. He taught at the Turkish universities of Bursa and Izmir before being awarded a Beineke Fellowship to Yale in 1990.

Although he has written three books about literature and 15 full-length articles, his passion is for writing his own poetry. From 2002-2005 the Ginninderra Press in Australia published three of his books, and since then he has completed two other collections, a chapbook and has given many readings in Ohio and out of state. His had a recent poetry reading at Joseph Beth Booksellers at Legacy Village, in the "Celebrating the Creative Spirit in Cleveland" series, organized by the Cleveland Psychoanalytic Center.

He was recently appointed to the faculty of the North East Ohio Master of Fine Arts program in poetry, run jointly by Kent State, Cleveland State, Youngstown State and the University of Akron.