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Celebrating a Career:
Dr. Martin Maner

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Dr. Martin Maner joined the Wright State faculty in September 1976. At that time, Wright State University had been in existence for only 12 years. During those same 12 years Marty Maner left Iowa City, where he had grown up, graduated from Occidental College in Los Angeles, California (where he followed the artist and filmmaker Terry Gilliam and was followed later by the young Barack Obama), and completed a Ph.D. at the University of Virginia. His career was interrupted by two years of military service, including a tour of duty in Vietnam.

The University of Virginia at that time boasted a particularly distinguished faculty of literary scholars, researchers, and editors. Marty was trained as a specialist in eighteenth-century British literature, the literature of the age of enlightenment—the age of reason—but he brought to Wright State so much more than the coverage of an important literary period. His apprenticeship gave him a passion for research, for accuracy, for attention to detail, and for the truth.

During his 33 years at Wright State, Marty Maner has taught literature, writing, and research methods to generations of students. He published many important articles and two landmark books, the first a study of the great critic and biographer Dr. Samuel Johnson, the second a careful and exhaustive textbook on research writing, the best available, and the earliest text to incorporate the then-new field of online research and the use of technology in writing. In his teaching and his scholarship, Dr. Maner not only exhibited his typical accuracy and attention to detail; he modeled to his students and to his colleagues the ethics, the morality of the scholar, for whom the pursuit of truth is an act of genuine humility. Dr. Maner’s dedication to his scholarship was recognized by the University when he received the 1999 President’s Award for Excellence in Research.

Many of his students and some of his colleagues do not know the other Marty Maner: the gifted musician, the successful trumpeter who has played with some of the finest jazz and blues musicians in the country. In fact, Marty joined his love of music with his research when he conducted and published a series of oral history interviews with some of Dayton’s senior jazz giants (many of them now gone). In Marty’s case, retirement will truly mark a ‘new phase’ of his life, as he will devote himself to composing, arranging, and orchestrating music.

Somehow with all his work, teaching, writing, researching, and performing, Dr. Maner also found time to serve the university in profoundly important ways: as Director of Graduate Studies in English; as a vital member of many important university committees, including the Promotion and Tenure committee; and as AAUP treasurer, to name a few. For much of his career he has worked tirelessly to support and improve the Paul Laurence Dunbar Library’s collections and research materials. The selfless dedication to others that he exhibits as a teacher and as a researcher also extends to his colleagues and his university.

We in the English department and in Liberal Arts are proud to have been able to serve with Marty Maner, and to know him as a caring, humane, brilliant, humble, and kind colleague.

See also Celebrating a Career: Carol Nathanson