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The Benjamin T. Spencer Lecture

Benjamin T. Spencer Honoring the individual for whom it is named and the faculty member who holds it, the Benjamin T. Spencer Professorship in Literature made history for Ohio Wesleyan University: for the first time at the institution an endowed chair was named for a living professor and for the first time a chair was fully funded by the endowment.

Under the terms of the professorship, a member of the English Department faculty is chosen to fill the chair for a two-year term, renewable once. The incumbent is to deliver yearly a public lecture, which carries a stipend.

Funding was made possible by a challenge grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities which was matched in three years by gifts, pledges, life income gifts and bequests chiefly from the students who remembered and loved Professor Spencer as a teacher and a mentor. A professor of English and Humanities at Ohio Wesleyan University for nearly forty years, Professor Spencer retired in 1969.

Professor Spencer had taught an estimated 7,000 students, and is remembered especially for his popular courses on Shakespeare and American literature. Professor Spencer, a graduate of Kentucky Wesleyan College, received his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Cincinnati. Before joining the faculty at Ohio Wesleyan, he taught at Kentucky Wesleyan. He also taught at the Universities of London and Manchester, England, as a Fulbright Lecturer, and at Uppsala and Stockholm Universities in Sweden, and at Wesleyan University.

The holder of honorary degrees from his Alma Mater and Kentucky Wesleyan, he was an honorary alumnus of Ohio Wesleyan and in 1963 was the first recipient of the Bishop Herbert Welch Meritorious Teacher Award.

He wrote numerous articles and several books, including The Quest for Nationality, Patterns of Nationality, and a volume on memorable dogs in literature.

Marty Hipsky
2006 - 2008
Benjamin T. Spencer
Professor of Literature

Record of Faculty Holding Spencer Chair

Professor Prindle
1999 - 2003

Professor Lewes
1994 - 1995
1996 - 1998

Professor Musser
1988 - 1992

Professor Carpenter
2003 - 2005