Summary of Martin Kich's Vita
Martin Kich is a Professor of English at Wright State University--Lake Campus. A member of the Lake Campus English Department since Fall 1990, he was granted tenure and promotion to Associate Professor in 1995 and was promoted to Full Professor in Spring 2001.
He taught previously as an adjunct professor at Lehigh University, Cedar Crest College, Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales, and Northampton County Area Community College. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. in English from Lehigh University, where for five years he was a Graduate Teaching Fellow and for two years the E.W. Fairchild Graduate Research Fellow in American Studies. He received baccalaureate degrees in English and history from the University of Scranton, graduating magna cum laude.
Professor Kich is the recipient of the 2000 Award for Faculty Excellence from the Trustees of Wright State University. The award is presented to one faculty member each year in recognition of sustained excellence in teaching, scholarship, and service. In 2000, he was a featured speaker at the June commencements at the Lake Campus and at the Dayton campus. In 2006, he received the Lake Campus' inaugural Outstanding Faculty Award, recognizing excellence in teaching, service, and scholarship. In 2000, he was honored with the Distinguished Service Award from the Association for the University Regional Campuses of Ohio.
The recipient of a CLICK IT! Award from the Wright State University Center for Teaching and Learning (recognizing Classroom Learning Interactively Combining Knowledge and Instructional Technology), he has also received a grant from the Wright State University Foundation, an Alumni Research Grant, and two Faculty Research Awards, two Institutional Research Awards, and one Teaching Research Award at the Lake Campus.
Professor Kich is the author of Western American Novelists: An Annotated Bibliography (New York: Garland: 1995). He is currently at work on A Guide to American Novelists of the 1990s and Beyond.
He has contributed 150 entries to The Canon of American Literature: 1,000 Great Works of American Literature, a forthcoming volume sponsored by the National Council of Teachers of English and published by Bowker. He has contributed chapters to books and essays to collections, to reference works on literature as well as historical, geographical, and cultural topics, to professional journals, to the publications of the Association for the University Regional Campuses of Ohio (AURCO), to Lectionary Homilitics, to the online Literary Encyclopedia, and to local periodicals, along with bibliographic articles to TEXT Technology and other publications. He has also been a regular book reviewer for several publications, and he has contributed poems to a broad variety of literary journals.
He has presented at the annual conferences of the Association for the University Regional Campuses of Ohio, the Midwest Modern Language Association, the Midwest Regional Conference of Teachers of English, the Ohio Association of Two-Year Colleges, and the Two-Year College English Association--Midwest Region, as well as at a special conference on James Purdy's work.
Professor Kich edits the following publications: Grand Lake Review, the annual literary journal of Wright State University--Lake Campus; Typeface, a monthly WAC newsletter featuring the work of Lake Campus students; A Gathering of High School Poets, Ohio Essay, and Ohio Story, publications related to annual contests for Ohio high school students, sponsored by Wright State University--Lake Campus; Younger Poets, a semi-annual newsletter featuring the work of elementary and middle-school students in West Central Ohio; AURCO Newsletter, a quarterly publication of the Association for the University Regional Campuses of Ohio; and Cyberfict, an annual journal concerned with computer-related fiction. He has also served as Book Review Editor of the quarterly journal TEXT Technology, co-editor of the AURCO Journal, and co-editor of Etude & Techne, a quarterly WAC newsletter.
Profesor Kich has a record of active community, professional, and university service.
A regular presenter of literary talks and workshops to school and community groups, he has been certified by the North Central Association as an External Chair for K-12 accreditation.
A member of the Modern Language Association, the Midwest Modern Language Association, the National Council of Teachers of English, the Conference on College Composition and Communication, the Two-Year College English Association--Midwest Region, the Western Literature Association, the Norman Mailer Society, and the Wallace Stevens Society, he is currently serving as president of the Association for the University Regional Campuses of Ohio and as a board member of the James Purdy Society.
He has co-authored several reports to the Ohio Board of Regents, including the Lake Campus' Service Expectations Report and Faculty Workload Report, as well as a number internal reports, including an extensive revisions of the Lake Campus' Promotion and Tenure Guidelines, the Lake Campus' Technology Plan, and the Lake Campus' Bargaining Unit By-Laws. He has served as Faculty Senate President at the Lake Campus and, like most Lake Campus faculty, has served on many Senate-related committees.
At the Lake Campus, Professor Kich has taught the following courses:
Writing Courses: English 085: Basic Writing; English 101: Composition [Exposition]; English 102: Composition [Argument and Research]; English 341: Advanced Composition for Secondary Teachers; English 342: Advanced Composition for Elementary Teachers; English 343: Advanced Composition [Focusing on Creative Nonfiction]; English 330: Business Writing; English 333: Fundamentals of Technical Writing; English 302: Creative Writing--Poetry; English 303: Creative Writing--Short Fiction; English 345: Writing Workshop; and English 346: Reading Workshop.
Courses in Language Studies: English 340: Language for Elementary Teachers; English 479: The History of the English Language; English 482: Grammatical Structures of English; and English 483: Sociolinguistics.
Literature Courses: English 205: African-American Literature; English 211: Introduction to Fiction; English 250: The Study of Literature, I [Analysis of Poetry]; English 256: Introduction to Literary Analysis; English 350: British and American Literature--History; English 352: Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century British Literature; English 354: Twentieth-Century British Literature; English 357: Twentieth-Century American Literature; English 359: Postcolonial Literatures; English 440: Regional and Ethnic Literatures; and Comparative Studies 231: Non-Western Literatures [Literatures of the Central America, South America, the Caribbean, Africa, the Islamic World, South Asia, Southeast Asia, East Asia, and Oceania].
University Honors Courses: Special Topics in English Composition: "America in the Next Century"; “American Television: Its History and Genres”; "Aspects of Small Town and Farm Life"; “The Culture of Celebrity”; “Elvis Presley and American Popular Culture”; “The Great Ideas of the Twentieth Century”; "The Horror Novel"; "My Community"; “The Mystery-Detective Novel”; "The Nature of Work"; “Popular Music”; "Slang"; "Urban Legends"; and "Your Generation: Coming of Age at the Beginning of the 21st Century."
Interdisciplinary University Honors Seminars: “American Murder: The Cultural Meanings of Mayhem"; "The Mafia and the Mafia Film"; "Assassins, Real and Imagined"; "Down Under: Aspects of Australian Geography, History, Literature, and Culture"; "The Meanings of Rivers"; "American Cities: The Development of the Distinctive Cultural and Social Milieus of Five Peculiarly American Cities”; “Chicago: An Interdisciplinary Profile"; "Incompatible Images: The Native American in History, Popular Culture, and Literature"; and "There Are No Butlers Anymore: The Mystery-Suspense Novel as an Artifact of the Popular Culture."