CSUN Professor Wins Fulbright Scholar Award

A Cal State Northridge professor is one of 700 U.S. university instructors this year to win a Fulbright Senior Scholar Award, one of academia’s highest honors.

Tom Spencer-Walters is the fourth CSUN faculty member in four years to win the award and the second Pan African Studies Department professor to be so recognized.

Spencer-Walters, who has spent the past 14 years at CSUN, will travel to South Africa in January to conduct seminars on Caribbean and African American literature at the University of Fort Hare, near Cape Town. He will also research a book about the African diaspora and oral traditions.

“Storytelling has been a very, very important element not only for entertainment, but for socializing the young and teaching them about traditional culture,” Spencer-Walters said. Now African novelists, such as Chinua Achebe of Nigeria, are preserving oral traditions by committing to paper the spoken word, he added.

Spencer-Walters, who won the award last month, will receive a monthly stipend of $2,600, plus moving expenses and a modest housing allowance.

The Fulbright program was established by the late Sen. J. William Fulbright to promote international academic studies. The grants are awarded to American students and scholars to study, teach and conduct research around the world.

Recent CSUN recipients include Joseph E. Holloway, also a Pan African Studies professor, who went to Botswana to teach African American history and pre-colonial African history; Michael Meyer, who is teaching and researching the history of the Third Reich in Germany this spring; and educational psychologist Stan Charnofsky, who will soon leave for Estonia to teach and conduct research.