Marshall William Fishwick (July 5, 1923 - May 22, 2006) was an American multi-disciplinary scholar, professor, writer, and editor who started the academic movement known as popular culture studies,...показать большеMarshall William Fishwick (July 5, 1923 - May 22, 2006) was an American multi-disciplinary scholar, professor, writer, and editor who started the academic movement known as popular culture studies, and established the journal International Popular Culture.
Born in Roanoke, Virginia, he was a graduate of Jefferson High School and held degrees from the University of Virginia, the University of Wisconsin, and Yale University, and later received honorary degrees from Bombay University, and Dhaka University.
He began his literary career while at sea with the Atlantic Fleet during World War II. His collected poems, The Face of Jang, were published in 1945. After the war, he earned a doctorate in American Studies at Yale University and began his teaching career at Washington and Lee University in 1949, retired as professor emeritus in the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences at Virginia Tech in 2003. In an academic career of more than fifty years, Dr. Fishwick contributed articles on American studies and popular culture to papers and journals all over the world. Additionally, he wrote more than twenty books and edited a dozen in the fields of history, literature, education, theology, and communication.
In 1970 he co-founded the Popular Culture Association with Ray B. Browne and Russel B. Nye, working to shape a new academic discipline that blurred the traditional distinctions between high and low culture, focusing on mass culture mediums like TV and the Internet, and cultural archetypes like comic book heroes.
He received eight Fulbright Awards and numerous additional grants, which enabled him to introduce the popular culture discipline at home and abroad in Denmark, Germany, Italy, Poland, Russia, Bangladesh, India, and Korea. The Popular Culture Association presented him with the Life Achievement Award in Popular Culture in 1997 and a lifetime achievement award in 1998.
He died in Blacksburg, Virginia in 2006, aged 82.показать меньше