Martin Buinicki

BIOGRAPHY

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 in 2003. In 2011, he was named the Walter G. Friedrich Professor of American Literature at Valparaiso University.

His teaching specialties include early and 19th-century American literature, literary theory, and philanthropy in American culture.  In his course Traditions of Giving and Serving in American Life, students not only read literary works, but they also learn about the Valparaiso community and its challenges and opportunities.  After a semester of research and discussion, the students allocate a significant charitable gift to area nonprofit agencies.  In 2010, the Learning by Giving Foundation awarded Professor Buinicki’s course with a grant that enables his students to award $10,000 to local organizations of their choosing each year.

In December 2011, the University of Iowa Press published Professor Buinicki’s book “Walt Whitman’s Reconstruction: Poetry and Publishing Between Memory and History.” He is also the author of “Negotiating Copyright: Authorship and the Discourse of Literary Property Rights in Nineteenth-Century America” (Routledge, 2006). Professor Buinicki has published articles in American Literary History, American Literary Realism, the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, and War, Literature, and the Arts, and essays in Witness to Reconstruction: Constance Fenimore Woolson and the Postbellum South, 1873-1894 (University Press of Mississippi, 2011), Beyond Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Essays on the Writing of Harriet Beecher Stowe (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2011), A Companion to Mark Twain (Blackwell, 2006), and American History through Literature (Scribners, 2006).

COURSES TAUGHT

Valparaiso University:

• ENGL 401: American Literature I
• ENGL 200: Literary Studies
• ENGL 200: Literary Studies: Into the Wild
• ENGL 396: Traditions of Giving and Serving in American Life
• ENGL 408: Methods of Literary Criticism and Research
• ENGL 493: Shadows of the American Renaissance (Senior Seminar)
• ENGL 493: Whitman and Dickinson (Senior Seminar)
• ENGL 610: Imagining the US Civil War
• Core: The Human Experience
• Christ College Freshman Program, Texts and Contexts (Honors College)