Michael Martin will deliver the 16th annual Victor J. Emmett Jr. Memorial Lecture at 8 p.m. Oct. 8 in the Balkans Room of the Overman Student Center, Pittsburg State University.
Martin is lecturer in English and co-director of the Nancy Geshke Writing Center at Marygrove College, Detroit, Mich. His topic will be “The Mystical Body of Romanticism.”
The lecture, open free to the public, will be followed by a brief award ceremony and reception in the Heritage Room.
The honor of delivering the Emmett Memorial Lecture goes to the author of the best essay on a literary topic published each year in “The Midwest Quarterly.” Martin’s winning essay was “Taking on Being: Betting Beyond Postmodern Criticism,” which will appear in the autumn 2009 issue.
The Emmett Memorial Award and Lecture are sponsored by the Emmett family, “The Midwest Quarterly” and the PSU English department. The award is given in memory of the late Dr. Victor J. Emmett Jr., who, before his death in 1990, was for 23 years a PSU English professor. He served at various times as English department chairman, acting dean of graduate studies and editor-in-chief of “The Midwest Quarterly.”
Martin received a bachelor of arts in English from Marygrove College in 1997 and a master of arts in liberal studies from the University of Detroit in 2000. He is currently studying for a doctorate in English at Wayne State University.
Besides his “Midwest Quarterly” article he has published an article on “The Merchant of Venice” in a casebook published this year, and articles on literature and religion in a number of journals. His article “Meditations on ‘Blade Runner’,” published in “Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies” in 2005, may be of interest to students. In addition to his scholarly work Martin has also published three pieces of creative non-fiction and more than a dozen poems in various journals and anthologies.
He taught at the Detroit Waldorf School for 11 years, serving as headmaster from 2004-2006, before joining the Marygrove College faculty. Martin currently lives on a small farm near Ann Arbor, Mich., with his wife and eight children.
PITTSBURG —
