Dr. Matthew Pettway Named Fulbright Scholar

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Posted on April 24, 2024

Joy Washington

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Dr. Matthew Pettway, associate professor of Spanish in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages and Literature at the University of South Alabama, has been selected as a 2024-25 Fulbright U.S. Scholar. 

The Fulbright Program is devoted to increasing mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries. Fulbright is the world’s largest and most diverse international educational exchange program. Pettway will be one of more than 800 scholars to network and make an impact globally.

As a Fulbright Scholar, Pettway will conduct archival research on the philosophical and ethical foundations of Black Brazilian manhood, sexuality and kinship in the 18th and 19th centuries at the Brazilian National Archive and the National Library of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro.

Pettway is South’s first African American scholar to receive a Fulbright.

“This is a phenomenal honor,” Pettway said. “This opportunity allows me to make a shift in my career toward  South America, more specifically. And I will still be able to maintain the common interests that I embrace as a Cuban scholar. This award is important because it brings scholars with diverse backgrounds from different countries to promote teaching and invaluable research.”

As a Fulbright Scholar, Pettway will teach a graduate course in the fall semester with Brazilian faculty at Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro examining Afro-Brazilian and African-American masculinities in literature and history. He will travel to Brazil in July and teach and conduct his research through December. 

“I want to make an impact there through my research and discovery of what enslaved Black men and boys thought of themselves as men, rather than others defining what that means for them,” he said. “Throughout history, enslaved Black men were always seen as dangerous and violent. But they had a life and culture of kinship and family before the beginning of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade.”

Pettway looks forward to sharing cultural and archaeological history, gleaned through his research and teaching, with his students at South, throughout the United States and abroad. 

In addition to the Fulbright opportunity, Pettway will deliver two lectures on the genesis of Black Cuban literature at the Academy of the Kingdom of Morocco on May 15 and 16.

Pettway is the author of “Cuban Literature in the Age of Black Insurrection: Manzano, Plácido and Afro-Latino Religion.” In July of 2023, he was invited to give public lectures at Doshisha University and Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, Japan.

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