DAHLONEGA — An English professor at North Georgia College & State University has been awarded a Fulbright grant to travel to Ukraine in April to teach a seminar on American literature.

Eric Link, who specializes in pre-1900s American literature, will spend a five-week residency at Lesya Ukrainka Volyn National University in Lutsk, Ukraine.

In addition to teaching, he also will consult with faculty members on issues of program and curricular development.

Link received the grant through the Fulbright Senior Specialists Program, which focuses on encouraging new activities that go beyond the traditional Fulbright Scholar responsibilities of lecturing and research.

"I’m really anxious to see how people from a very different part of the world and a different culture, where English is a second language, respond to some of the texts in American literature that I teach here," Link said.

He’ll be working with faculty members in Lesya’s Department of Romance and Germanic Language and Literature.

They "are interested in doing some program evaluation, developing their curriculum, and getting some advice on what some of the trends are in the teaching of American literature and in American literary scholarship," Link said.

He said he believes that his European counterparts are "now where they’re really interested in breaking away from (a) rather rigidly prescribed set of approved texts and developing a larger sense of what’s out there."

Link said he is looking forward to the experience. "I’ve never been to Ukraine. I’ve never really taught outside the United States."

He said he doesn’t speak Ukrainian or Russian.

"I’m trying to teach myself a few words to get by: please, hello, thank you and so forth," he said.

"But the ... instruction will be in English. The colleagues at the university that I’ll be working with closely are fluent in English and teach American literature themselves.

"So I suspect I’ll be in good hands."

Link, 40, has taught more than 20 classes, mostly in American literature, for 11-plus years at North Georgia.

Link has been published more than 40 times, including as the author of "The Vast and Terrible Drama: American Literary Naturalism in the Late Nineteenth Century" and the co-author of "Neutral Ground: New Traditionalism and the American Romance Controversy."

His third academic book, "Understanding Philip K. Dick," is scheduled for publication in 2009 from the University of South Carolina Press.