ISU English Professor Brian Attebery selected to serve as visiting professor at the University of Glasgow

The Leverhulme Trust sponsors up to 15 highly competitive visiting professorships a year, bringing scholars in all disciplines and from all over the world to institutions in the United Kingdom. The University of Glasgow offers one of the few graduate programs in fantasy literature and is in the process of creating a Fantasy Research Centre.

“Professor Brian Attebery is the pre-eminent name in the field of fantasy literature, author of three of the most influential monographs in the field and editor of its most respected journal,” said Robert Maslan, the program’s director. “At a time when the University of Glasgow is seeking to set up the world’s first Fantasy Research Centre, professor Attebery’s expertise and global network of contacts will be invaluable in helping us to develop a research plan and programme of events for the Centre over the next five years.”

As part of Attebery’s residency at the university, he will give five lecture/seminars, consult on developing the Research Centre, deliver a keynote address at the annual Glasgow International Fantasy Conference and work on his current research project, which examines the relationship between fantasy and dreaming. He will also travel around Britain, meeting with students and conducting seminars at the Universities of London, Liverpool, Edinburgh, Lancaster and St. Andrews and Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge.

"I look forward to representing ISU's College of Arts and Letters, which is partially supporting this venture, and the English Department, which has quietly grown into one of the strongest and most innovative segments of the University," Attebery said.        

Attebery is a professor of English and director of graduate studies in English at ISU. He edits the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, a publication of the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts. He is the author and editor of numerous books and articles, including "Stories About Stories: Fantasy and the Remaking of Myth" (Oxford UP, 2014) and the Library of America's series of Ursula K. LeGuin editions.