Salman Rushdie can again add "professor" to his resume. The award-winning author has joined Emory University for a five-year stint teaching world literature to graduate students. His appointment is coupled with the donation of his literary archive to the college's library, a collection that includes manuscripts, journals, letters and photographs from his writing career.Rushdie, 59, said Tuesday that this will be his only long-term commitment with a U.S. university because he wants to focus on writing more novels. He chose Emory "because they asked me and nobody else ever had," he told a group of reporters at a news conference. "The opportunity this offered is to go into much greater depth with a subject and with a group of people - both students and faculty," said Rushdie, who has lectured at campuses around the globe and has been an honorary professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The worn pages of the unpublished short stories and hand-drawn journals that fill his archive are a big boon for Emory, which wants to be known as a center for prestigious literary collections. The library already is home to archives from British poet laureate Ted Hughes and Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney. "There is an attempt to build an extraordinary library here. The idea of becoming a part of developing that archive into another direction, which is prose, became very attractive to me," Rushdie said.
Rushdie held his first class at Emory on Tuesday, the day before the 18th anniversary of the death threat that catapulted him to worldwide fame. Rushdie was forced into hiding in England for a decade after the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a 1989 fatwa, or religious edict, ordering Muslims to kill Rushdie because of charges that Rushdie's book The Satanic Verses insulted Islam.
In 1998, the Iranian government declared it would not support but could not rescind the fatwa. Rushdie said he receives a "sort of Valentine's card" from Iran each year on Feb. 14 letting him know the country has not forgotten the vow to end his life. "It's reached the point where it's a piece of rhetoric rather than a real threat," Rushdie said.