SUU Professor Receives Fulbright to Azerbaijan

Published: January 08, 2007 | Read Time: 3 minutes

Dr. S.S. Moorty, professor of English literature at Southern Utah University, has been selected for a Fulbright Scholarship to Baku Salvic University in Azerbaijan.

Moorty has been teaching at SUU since 1975, specializing in the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Shakespeare, Eastern literatures in translation, American Literary Realism and Naturalism, the Renaissance, and Eastern World View.

He will teach American Literature courses as a senior Fulbright scholar.

This is Moorty’s third Fulbright Scholarship. He served his first in an Eastern Europe higher education institution in Moldova in 2002. In 1989, he served as a senior Fulbright lecturer to Sanaa University in Yemen. On each occasion of choice, the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board acknowledged Moorty’s impressive accomplishments and expressed full confidence that he would exemplify the same standards of excellence as a representative of the American people abroad.

Moorty received his bachelor’s in business from Osmania University in South India; his master’s in English and British Literature from Delhi University in India; and his doctorate in English and American Literature from the University of Utah.

Moorty has shared his vast knowledge of world literature with university students across the globe. In 1997, he taught as a Balkan Scholar at the American University in Bulgaria. During the summers of 1989 and 2000, he was invited as a Visiting Professor to teach Albanian, Serbian, Macedonian, Bulgarian and Romanian students courses in Eastern Literatures in English translation.

His expertise and his contributions to quality higher education have been recognized with numerous distinguished awards, acknowledgements and fellowships, from prestigious entities, domestic and abroad.

Close to home, he was given the Distinguished College Teaching Award from the Utah Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters in 1986, and an award from the southern Utah chapter of Phi Delta Kappa for “outstanding contributions to the education profession.”

In 1991, students gave him their award for “Master of Philosophy and Teaching,” and in 1994, and again in 1996, Moorty received SUU’s Distinguished Faculty Honor Lecture award. Also, he was honored with the First Place Distinguished Faculty Publication Award. Most recently, Moorty received the honorable Outstanding Scholar Award in 2005.

He has published two “inhouse” books (anthologies)—“Eastern World View” and “Critical Documents on American Literary Realism & Naturalism”--and many award-winning essays, poems and scholarly papers. His scholarly articles have appeared in professional journals in France, Spain, India and the U.S. In 2000, he received the Best Paper award from the Utah Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters. For SUU’s Honors Program, Moorty offered a fascinating lecture on “Hindu Values and Thought in the Context of the Changing American Religious Landscape.”

Moreover, he was the First Place recipient, three times, in the English Essay writing contest of the Telugu Association of North America. That organization also awarded Moorty for “excellence in literature” as well as the Cultural Festival of India’s Felicitation Award for outstanding accomplishments in, and contributions to the field of literature by a person of Indian origin.

The Fulbright Scholar Program came to be after Senator J. William Fulbright, in 1945, envisioned a program that would promote “mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of the other countries of the world.” Under President Truman, this government-funded program was signed into law. Now, about 800 U.S. faculty and professionals from nearly 40 disciplines travel to more than 140 countries each year to educate and enlighten the world.

Becoming a U.S. Fulbright Scholar means joining the cadre of men and women—past and present—who are helping to shape the world. Not surprisingly, the application process is a rigorous, elite one. Few other opportunities offer such a connection to a vital dimension to academia and the profession world.

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