During the 2019-2020 school year, Dr. Michael Martin showed an outstanding ability to adapt his classroom to a virtual setting. For the Final Project in his Survey of American Literature II class, Dr. Martin planned to take his students on an optional field trip to Grand Isle to compare Kate Chopin’s descriptions of Grand Isle in her novel The Awakening with their observations. Because of COVID-19 and the Stay at Home order, the field trip was canceled, but Dr. Martin was determined to offer his students a creative writing option for their Final Project. Instead, Dr. Martin gave his students the option to put on a virtual performance via Zoom of Chopin’s short story “At the ‘Cadian Ball,” which proved itself to be a huge success.
Outside of the classroom, Dr. Martin has had other noteworthy accomplishments throughout the school year. In the Fall of 2019, Dr. Martin, along with Dr. Erick Piller, created ‘Humanities Write,’ a faculty writing group meant to further academic study in the interdisciplinary Humanities.
Additionally, Dr. Martin published “The Lost Acadians and the Louisiana Homeland: 19th-Century American Poetry and Prose Portrayals of Exile” in The CEA Critic. Dr. Martin’s article “Settlement, Cultural Memory, and Sacred Sites: The Function of Place-Names within the Cherokee Wonder Stories” appears in the Fall-Winter (2019) issue of Studies in American Indian Literatures. In the Spring of 2020, Dr. Martin’s teaching reflection, based on an online course at Nicholls, was published in the Thoreau Society Bulletin.
Dr. Martin also works as a faculty advisor for Chênière, Nicholls State University’s digital Humanities journal.
