The title of my keynote address at the Chaplin conference was "Acting in History: Chaplin, Movies, and Culture."  I am occasionally available to deliver talks on Chaplin, either overviews of his fascinating career or more focused talks on his life and art during the making of City Lights.   If interested, please contact me by email.

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 more current work. I recently returned from an International  Chaplin Conference, where I delivered the keynote address. (see the image on the left). The kind invitation from Lisa Stein, the biographer of Charlie's brother Syd Chaplin, was in part to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the publication of my book, Chaplin and American Culture: The Evolution of a Star Image. 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