My name is Martin Lewison. I'm currently an associate professor of Business Management at Farmingdale State College on Long Island.
I grew up in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey and went to high school at Fieldston in the Bronx. I did my undergraduate studies at Columbia College (A.B. Economics, 1988), Columbia University in Manhattan, and then attended graduate school, first at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, where I studied Economics but did not take a degree, and then at the Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business at the University of Pittsburgh, where I earned a Ph.D. in Business in 2001. The title of my Ph.D. thesis was "Organizations and logos: Effects of visual symbols on stakeholder social identity," a study of logos and nicknames in Minor League Baseball.
Before coming to Farmingdale, I had faculty appointments at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville (1999-2001) in Sport Marketing, at the University of Arkansas at Monticello (2001-2003) in Business, and at Hotelschool The Hague (2008-2012) in The Netherlands as a Senior Lecturer in Accounting and Finance. I have also been a visiting lecturer at Carlow College and Parsons School of Design, and an invited guest speaker at Breda University of Applied Sciences in their Theme Park Management program. Outside of academia, I spent nearly six years (2003-2008) with Standard & Poor's in their Structured Finance CDO ratings surveillance group.
I have some expertise in the global amusement park industry, especially with regard to pricing, marketing, and strategy. As of this writing, I have ridden on more than 2,200 different roller coasters at nearly 900 different amusement parks, fairs, and FECs. I have been quoted in news stories about the theme park industry, appearing in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Orlando Sentinel, the Orange County Register, CBS News Moneywatch, the San Diego Union-Tribune, the San Antonio Express-News, the Washington Post, Yahoo Entertainment, CNN Travel, and others. My audio appearances include Morning Edition, Marketplace, Here and Now, The World, The Motley Fool Money Podcast, and the Knowledge@Wharton Podcast. I have consulted for theme parks and theme park vendors and suppliers in the U.S., Europe, and Asia.
I currently teach courses in Strategic Management, International Marketing, Advertising, American Business History, and I also teach a course on Theme Parks and Tourism. In Fall 2023 I will be teaching an introductory course in Hospitality Management.
I am a member of Beta Theta Pi Fraternity and served the General Fraternity as a volunteer for many years. I also speak Dutch and Spanish at a low-intermediate level.