Faculty: Martin Buinicki

 

Professor Buinicki's teaching specialties include early and nineteenth century American literature.

Professor Buinicki joined the Valparaiso University English faculty in 2004 after teaching for a year at Grinnell College. He earned his B.A. and M.A. at the University of Northern Colorado and received his Ph.D. in English from the University of Iowa.

He likes being at VU because of its emphasis on community: he appreciates the commitment to dialogue between students and between faculty members.

In the classroom Professor Buinicki strives to help his students see the complexity and important issues that a particular text offers. His classes tend to be discussion-based because he wants all members, including himself, to work together to gain a better understanding of the literature. He comments on his approach to teaching: "I think that the things we read are far more interesting and complex than I am, so, once I have provided necessary contextual information and raised some critical questions, I try to get out of the way and make sure that the text is our primary concern."

His teaching specialties include early and nineteenth-century American literature. Professor Buinicki is particularly fond of Herman Melville, Mark Twain, and Walt Whitman. His love of literature stems in part from the excitement of entering into the on-going discussions of these writers and their works, and he hopes to convey this to his students by demonstrating how their coursework can be relevant beyond the classroom.

In 2006, Professor Buinicki’s book Negotiating Copyright: Authorship and the Discourse of Literary Property Rights in Nineteenth-Century America was published by Routledge. He has also published articles in American Literary History, American Literary Realism, and the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, and essays in A Companion to Mark Twain (Blackwell, 2006) and American History through Literature (Scribners, 2006).

In addition to teaching, Professor Buinicki serves on the Wordfest Committee and as chair of the English Department Library Committee.

Professor Buinicki spends much of his free time raising two boys. Other interests include cooking, writing and theatre.

The Walt Whitman Archive