2020 Retiring Faculty

Martin Hipsky

Professor of English
(1995-2020)

In his career at Ohio Wesleyan, Martin A. Hipsky has been an inspiring teacher, respected scholar, and dedicated participant in the administration of the University.

From his earliest years as a child in Litchfield, Connecticut, Marty had a passion for literature. His 2nd grade love of encyclopedias was perhaps the first harbinger of the wide and deep erudition for which he is well known. He received his B.A. in classics (Latin and Greek) from Yale University, after which he took a position teaching English in Greece for a year. Upon return to the United States, he joined the graduate program in English at Duke University, where he earned his M.A. and Ph.D.

Dr. Hipsky was chosen by the Department of English at Ohio Wesleyan for a position teaching modern and contemporary British literature before he even left the Duke campus, having been interviewed there by Joe Musser, who would quickly become an important mentor to the new faculty member. Dr. Hipsky taught a number of courses in his early years, from the first-year writing seminar, Introduction to Literary Study and Narratives, to the advanced seminar in critical methods. In the last decade of his teaching at OWU, Dr. Hipsky began teaching film courses, having published on popular television shows such as The Sopranos and on Merchant-Ivory films. He was instrumental in constructing the film studies major and co-directed the film series at the Strand. Over the years he has offered many independent studies and helped pave the way for many young budding academics.  

Dr. Hipsky's publications span three distinctive but interlocking fields: film studies, British literature, and critical theory. His book-length study, Modernism  and the Women's Popular Romance in Britain, 1885-1925, brought new understanding of the popular romance, a genre sometimes stigmatized and overshadowed by comparison with the high modernist works of writers like Mansfield, Woolf, and Joyce. Dr. Hipsky offers rich historical contextualization of efforts by popular women romance writers like Marie Corelli to gain respectability and a devoted transatlantic readership, demonstrating numerous hitherto unrecognized connections between the world of high modernism and more popular romance novels.

Dr. Hipsky made important contributions throughout his career at OWU. He served for many years on the Academic Policy Committee, chaired the Department of English, and served as Associate Dean of First-Year Students. As director of the Freshman Writing Program, he strengthened the coordination between the Sagan National Colloquium and first-year writing, which enabled OWU to present a common experience to all new students.

In his retirement, Dr. Hipsky expects to enjoy more time outdoors, bicycling with his daughter, Lilly, and trout fishing in the streams of the Bantam River in the area of Connecticut where he grew up and where his mother still resides. He is currently working on a new scholarly project about serial narrative in the Victorian era and today.