Professor Michael K. Glenday

Following undergraduate and graduate degrees in Scotland and the United States, my PhD was conferred by the University of Kent at Canterbury for a dissertation on the fiction of Saul Bellow.

My first teaching appointment was at the University of Kent, followed by a Lectureship in American Literature at the Department of American Studies at the University of Manchester. Later career teaching appointments included that at the Department of Latin American Studies at the University of Liverpool.

As a Fulbright Scholar at Purdue University, I completed an MA while working in the English Department there with Professor William Stafford, editor of the journal Modern Fiction Studies. Other early career scholarships included those from the Carnegie Trust for Scotland, a Wolfson Scholarship and a Major Scottish Studentship, all of which supported my full-time doctoral studies as well as my research in the field of Scottish literary studies.

Work at the Open University commenced in 1983 with what would eventually become a continuous series of appointments over the next 35 years as a Tutor-Counsellor, subsequently Tutor, and Associate Lecturer in the North West of England region. Courses taught included all iterations of the university's arts foundation modules, so AA100, A101, A102, A103, and AA100. Associated with the majority of those were the 25 OU Arts residential schools I was delighted to teach over the years at a range of host universities such as Westfield College and Royal Holloway College of London University, as well as the universities of Stirling, Keele and Reading. 

Research interests began with 20th century Scottish poetry and in the field of 20th and subsequently 21st century American literature. In my first books, both published by the MacMillan press, 'Saul Bellow and the Decline of Humanism' (1990) and 'Norman Mailer' (1995), the response of US novelists to the emerging post-1945 experience in their culture was presented as a touchstone of a larger national self-reckoning and dismay.

A co-edited volume of essays by British and American scholars, titled 'American Mythologies: Essays on Contemporary Literature' (2005) expressed a millennial  reassessment of foundational and developing American myths and legends.

Around the same time I recommenced research on the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, something of a lifelong enthusiasm which had been the subject of my undergraduate dissertation at the University of Dundee. Attendance and papers given at international conferences at universities in eg Nice, Vevey, Cambridge and London, further established this presence in Fitzgerald scholarship, leading to my current role as a co-founder and editor of the journal the 'F. Scott Fitzgerald Review', now published annually by the Pennsylvania State University Press. My monograph titled 'F. Scott Fitzgerald' was published in 2012 and is currently published by Bloomsbury and online by Bloomsbury Collections. 

Around the same period as the new century began, and again after subsequent attendance and papers given at international conferences in Paris and Provincetown, I was invited to join the Board of Editors of the 'Mailer Review', a peer-reviewed academic journal published annually by the University of South Florida's Department of English.

My current project concerns research into a selection of 21st century American arts and fictions. I also maintain a developing interest in Finnish architecture and culture.