The Department of English is honored to announce the Morris Beja Odyssey Award: Thriving Through Global Discovery, an endowment created in honor of Professor Morris Beja by his children, Andrew and Eleni. They, and the entire Beja family, hope their gift will allow English majors to follow in Professor Beja’s footsteps—to travel in the United States and abroad and learn through research, deliver papers, or study abroad programs. 

Professor Beja was a faculty member in the Department of English from 1961–2002, and chair from 1983-1994. He remained devoted to the department even after he retired in 2002, continuing to teach as an Academy Professor Emeritus. He taught courses on film and literature, including authors James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, his particular specialties: he received the Lifetime Service Award of the International James Joyce Foundation, of whom he was honorary trustee for life; and he was founder, executive secretary, and trustee of the International Virginia Woolf Society. He also served on the editorial boards of thirteen scholarly journals and presses, acting as Chair of the Editorial Board of the Ohio State University Press.  

Department chair Elizabeth Hewitt recounts how “after Murray’s death, I was able to talk with his children, Andrew and Eleni, who wanted to honor their father and his devotion to the department through an endowed gift. Having just lost my own mother, I was deeply moved that amidst their grief they wanted to share their father’s legacy with a gift to the department.” 

Beja was passionate about travelling and often travelled for both work and pleasure. The “Odyssey” in the award’s title is meant to capture this love and support of travel, and is also an allusion to his lifelong study of James Joyce, whose magisterial Ulysses is a retelling of a sort of The Odyssey. The family hopes this award will help students embark on journeys of their own, expanding their horizons and learning as they go. Hewitt adds that “because it is an endowed fund, we will be able to give these awards to our students in the major every year. I know how transformational these kinds of experiences can be, and the gift allows students who might not otherwise have the financial ability to embrace opportunities that quite literally can shape their lives.” 

The Department will be inviting students to apply this academic year and will be able to give out the first Beja Odyssey Awards at this spring’s annual Awards Celebration.  

We reached out to Andrew Beja for a short interview about this scholarship fund. Responses have been edited for style and length. 

What made you want to create this award and how do you hope it will support students?  

A few years ago, Dad published a memoir about his first 20 years, Tell Us About–– it was prompted by my asking him one day to tell us about his mother who unfortunately passed away before Eleni and I were born.  

While reading the memoir, I had the idea of creating a scholarship in Dad's name. I did some research and decided it was something I'd like to do one day. After he died, Dad’s wife, Ellen Carol Jones, floated a similar idea. Eleni and I talked with our family about the possibilities and what a scholarship in Dad’s name might look like, then worked closely with his friend and the current chair of the English department, Beth Hewitt, on a scholarship that would reflect that idea.   

We’re excited about the result and hope this award allows current and future Ohio State students to benefit from the kind of enrichment that our Dad had. He was a first-generation college student, and it was through travel awards that he was first able to experience other cultures, interweave scholarship and symposia, and make lifelong friendships. This was hugely important to him and had a tremendous impact on our family. Fulbright Scholarships (Dad got two) allowed us to live abroad, and being immersed in another culture was formative for all of us.  

Throughout his life Dad never stopped traveling. He believed deeply in the virtues of travel, of meeting and exchanging ideas and experiences with people from other parts of the globe. He continued to engage in such odysseys throughout his life and was a tireless advocate for academic travel funds both as a professor and as chair of the English department. Watching this and experiencing the benefits firsthand ourselves led us to want to establish The Odyssey Award in his honor.   

How did you choose to name the award?

The emphasis on ‘thriving’ in the award’s title comes from a phrase in Greek: mia ánthousa zoé. It means “a life well lived” or, literally, “a life in full bloom.” Dad's life epitomized mia ánthousa zoé. This is also a nod to Bloomsday, the day on which James Joyces’ Ulysses takes place. Joyce played a big role in Dad’s life. He taught Ulysses and Joyce’s other novels and played a very important role in the Joyce literary world, including serving as President of the James Joyce Foundation for many years and earning the Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

I've had an Odyssean journey of my own with Ulysses. Through the years I started the book many times, only to bail each time—usually after just a few pages. Just too hard. But in 2012, I tried again, this time signing up for a course taught by a Harvard professor at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education. 

The first day we're all sitting around the room in an oval, and the professor asks us each to say our name and share a bit about why we were there. I was next to last, and as soon as I said who I was the professor breathlessly interrupted me to say, "Wait, are you any relation to Murray Beja?!?"

"Yes", I said, and he went on to share with the class what a monumental figure Dad was in the world of Joyce.

I got through that class and Ulysses (barely, kind of), but that was not the end of my journey with Ulysses. During the pandemic, over the course of a year and a half, a group of us got to read and discuss the novel over Zoom with Dad and Ellen leading the discussion. It was so joyful to be able to experience some of what his students did for five decades. His perspective, his insights, his stories, and yes, the slides.

Incidentally, through both the course and our Zoom Ulysses group, I gained an appreciation of both how impossible it is for any mere mortal to get through Ulysses without a great deal of help and that the novel is worth it. I used to question what the heck all these scholars could still be talking about 100 years after the book was written. But now I get it. It is that good—and that hard—and I'm so, so thankful we got to do it together.  

Is there anything else you want people to know about this award?  

Dad went through life with a sense of optimism and positiveness. Given the state of the world, some might put this in the bucket of a "nice to have," rather than a "need to have.” A few months ago, I had lunch with two former English department colleagues of Dad’s at the faculty club, Professors David Frantz and Steve Fink. Frantz and Fink joked that they used to rib Dad about his Joyce globetrotting. One day he told them that the next Joyce conference was in China and that was when they reminded him that Joyce himself had never even been to China and that this was finally a boondoggle too far.  

But Dad believed in the virtues of traveling and exchanging ideas— even if it meant holding a Joyce conference in China.  

The Department of English extends its gratitude to Andrew and Eleni Beja for this endowment, as well as all gifts we receive to support the work in our department. To donate to the Morris Beja Odyssey Award fund, number 484396, visit Ohio State’s giving page.