Jack Nachbar earns a lifetime achievement award

When he accepts the 2002 American Culture Association Governing Board Award for Outstanding Contributions to American Culture Studies this week in Toronto, Jack Nachbar, professor emeritus of popular culture, says he will take double delight.

First, because he is proud and pleased to receive the highest honor given by the association he has been a member of for many years. And, second, because honored along with him will be his longtime friend and colleague Michael Marsden, a BGSU professor emeritus of popular culture and now provost of Eastern Kentucky University.

“I’m thrilled and honored to be recognized along with my old compadre. We were plotters together for a lot of years,” Nachbar said.

Together, Nachbar and Marsden have done perhaps more than anyone to bring serious scholarship to the study of popular television and Hollywood movies. They founded the Journal of Popular Film and Television along with Sam Grogg Jr. 30 years ago, before television was generally considered a legitimate topic of scholarship, and have published articles by many of the top international scholars in the field over the years. While more than 100 journals on television have come and gone over the last quarter century, the BGSU publication has endured, which Nachbar says is among his most satisfying achievements, as has the subsequent success and international pre-eminence of Bowling Green’s Department of Popular Culture.

Nachbar served as director of the film studies program for 15 years, and taught about 50 different film courses, from silent films to Hollywood musicals and gangster films. Today, more than 1,000 BGSU students take the introduction to popular culture class each year.

Drawn to BGSU in 1970 by the work of Ray Browne, founder of the original center, Nachbar joined the fledgling Department of Popular Culture as a doctoral student. “We were much criticized at the time and even accused of undermining liberal education,” Nachbar said of the new discipline. “But it struck me as common sense to study popular culture.” He received his Ph.D. in American literature and popular culture in 1974, writing his dissertation on movie Westerns.

His 1974 book Focus on the Western was a breakthrough piece on the genre, according to Marsden. “Jack has done pioneering work in a number of areas, but his work on Westerns really drew critical attention to them.”

Speaking of his former student and protégé, Browne said, “I was always proud to have him. He’s always been a success and wanted to help make our undertaking a success, too.”

Another achievement dear to Nachbar’s heart is the Master Teacher Award, which he won in 1996. BGSU’s most prestigious award for faculty, it is given by the Undergraduate Alumni Association and voted on by students.

“Jack loves young people,” said Tom Klein, Nachbar’s colleague in the Chapman Learning Community, where he has taught since his retirement in 1997. “He brings great passion to his teaching, along with a love of the common culture, respect for the individual and an anti-elitist value system. His grounding in his discipline is impeccable, yet he never takes himself too seriously. He also brings a sense of drama that’s wonderful.”

It was perhaps a natural that Nachbar was was one the two original faculty members invited to join the Chapman Community. “Jack has a strong urge to get closer to the students and to integrate the disciplines,” Klein said.

Nachbar’s 1992 book, Popular Culture: An Introductory Text, which he co-edited with Kevin Lause, has been adopted by about 60 colleges and universities. It is one of 10 books he has co-written, along with numerous articles, several together with Marsden.

In 1995 he received a $65,800 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to teach a five-week seminar for schoolteachers nationwide on “The Films of Frank Capra and the American Middle Class.” “That experience was a highlight,” he said.