At the end of the Summer 2024 session, Technical Writing professor Dr. Michael Martin will be fulfilling a long-awaited goal of moving across the world to Poland to teach as a professor at Jagiellonian University in Krakow.
He currently is the Director of the Professional Writing and Rhetoric program and Associate Professor of English. He will continue to teach the same technical writing course, as he has for 15 years at Bloomsburg University. Dr. Martin remarked on the similarities of teaching the subject even on two different continents.
“Especially now that more and more companies are international… formatting, audience purpose, rhetorical strategies, it doesn’t matter what the culture is the basics are still the same.”, said the Technical Writing professor.
This will be far from Dr. Martin’s first visit to the country, as he started visiting Poland with Bloomsburg’s Eastern-Central European Winter Session Trip, immediately falling in love with the country and the culture.
His aspiration to learn the Polish language was sparked after caretaking for an Austrian woman who immigrated to America with her Polish husband in the 1950s with only two suitcases and $100.
Dr. Martin has plans to write a historical fiction novel about the couple’s lives with hopes to be able to conduct the research without the need for a translator.
He said, “They represent this whole generation of people who came to the United States and, kind of, self-exiled. They left their country, and they left their culture, and they left their language, and they left their foods, they left everything to come be Americans. And in some ways, we lost a lot of their culture because they felt like they had to.”
Dr. Martin compared the city center of Krakow to be similar to walking around Bloomsburg. “It’s that quaint and kind, but yet it has a million more people.”
His excitement is undeniable, but he did not forget to express the joy he’s found teaching at Bloomsburg, “I’ve loved being here, there are lots of amazing students and colleges.’ and how much he will miss his nieces and nephews.
It’s fair to say that Dr. Michael Martin will be greatly missed by the BU community, but the community wishes him good luck on his new adventure.
