Welcome to my home page.  I'm a teacher and scholar with interdisciplinary interests in film studies, American literature, American cultural and intellectual history in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, and American studies.  In the summer of 2007 my most recent book, City Lights, was published in the British Film Institute Film Classics series.  Click the "Current Work" button above for more on that and my other current work. I'm in the two pictures to the right, not the picture at the top of the page.  There you may recognize William Macy playing Jerry Lundegard in the Coen Brothers' Fargo.  I grew up in Minnesota, and the poster to the right and above my head in the first picture is of another person with Minnesota roots. My wife Nancy took the picture below in the summer of 2003.  I'm sitting by the statue of Etienne Marey, a 19th-century inventor of a motion-picture camera, in his home town of Beaune, France.  Chuck Maland