Paul Haspel

Paul Haspel

Paul Haspel

Associate Professor

Chesapeake Bay regional literature and culture; film studies

I was born in Washington, D.C.; grew up in Bethesda, Maryland; vacationed with my family on the Delaware coast; and went to college in Tidewater Virginia.  Perhaps it is for that reason that my initial scholarly interest in literature and culture of the American South changed over time into a more specific interest in literature and culture of the Chesapeake Bay region.  My 30 years' teaching experience at colleges and universities in Maryland, Illinois, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and now Virginia has deepened my interest in American regionalism generally.  I have a particular interest in the work of Edgar Allan Poe, and have also published in the fields of film studies and Civil War studies.

Current Research

"Baskerville's Antecedents: Ratiocination and Animality in the Work of Edgar Allan Poe and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle" (book project)

"Andersonville Revisited: The Civil War's Most Notorious Prisoner-of-War Camp, in a 1950's Novel and a 1990's Mini-Series" (article project)

Selected Publications

"Berlin’s Own Rip Van Winkle: The Washington Irving Connection in Wolfgang Becker’s Good Bye, Lenin!Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies 53.4 (November 2017).

“SRSD for RAFT Writing.” Design Principles for Teaching Effective Writing. E-Book. Amsterdam: Brill Editions, 2017.

“California in Extremis: A West Coast Setting and 1960’s Anxiety in The Birds.” Hitchcock Annual 20 (2015).

“District of Tomorrow: Science Fiction Films in Washington, D.C.” World Film Locations: Washington, D.C. Ed. Katherine Larsen. Chicago: Intellect Books/University of Chicago Press, 2015.

“Capital of Fear: The Washington, D.C., Suspense Film.” World Film Locations: Washington, D.C. Ed. Katherine Larsen. Chicago: Intellect Books/University of Chicago Press, 2015.

Expanded Publication List

"Berlin’s Own Rip Van Winkle: The Washington Irving Connection in Wolfgang Becker’s Good Bye, Lenin!Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies 53.4 (November 2017).

“SRSD for Raft Writing.” Design Principles for Teaching Effective Writing. E-Book. Amsterdam: Brill Editions, 2017. 

“California in Extremis: A West Coast Setting and 1960’s Anxiety in The Birds."  Hitchcock Annual 20 (2015). 

“District of Tomorrow: Science Fiction Films in Washington, D.C.” World Film Locations: Washington, D.C. Ed. Katherine Larsen. Chicago: Intellect Books/University of Chicago Press, 2015.

“Capital of Fear: The Washington, D.C., Suspense Film.” World Film Locations: Washington, D.C. Ed. Katherine Larsen. Chicago: Intellect Books/University of Chicago Press, 2015.

[with Jianan Wang and Rayne A. Sperling] “Patterns of Procrastination, Motivation, and Strategy Use Across Class Contexts and Students’ Abilities.” Journal of Psychology and Behavioral Science 3.2 (December 2015).

“Cambria in Twilight, Part 2: A Fictive Pennsylvania Rust Belt Town as Locale of Hopelessness in All the Right Moves.” Pennsylvania English 37 (Fall 2014/Spring 2015).

“Cambria in Twilight: A Pennsylvania County as Landscape of Despair in George Roy Hill’s Slap Shot.” Pennsylvania English 36 (Fall 2013/Spring 2014).

“The Civil War in Film: The Depiction of Combat in Glory.” The Civil War in Popular Culture: Memory and Meaning. Eds. Lawrence A. Kreiser Jr. and Randal W. Allred. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013.

“Two D.C. Reporters vs. a President: The City of Washington as Political and Media Chessboard in Alan J. Pakula’s All the President’s Men.” Mid-Atlantic Almanack (Fall 2012).

“Bells of Freedom and Foreboding: Liberty Bell Ideology and the Clock Motif in Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Masque of the Red Death.’” The Edgar Allan Poe Review 13.1 (Spring 2012).

“Being There in the Nation’s Capital: Hal Ashby’s Subversion of the Washington, D.C., Political Redemption Drama.” Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities 30.1 (Fall 2010).

“Agency Games in Cold War Washington: Politics and Gender in No Way Out.” Journal of Popular Film & Television 38.3 (September 2010).

“Baltimore Colts and Diner Guys: Professional Sports and Civic Identity in Barry Levinson’s Diner.” Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature 26.2 (Spring/Summer 2009).

“Avalon Lost: Suburbanization and Its Discontents in Barry Levinson’s Avalon.” Journal of American Culture 31.4 (December 2008).

“Arthur on a Quest in Baltimore: Mythic Archetypes, Social Criticism, and Civic SelfPromotion in …And Justice for All.” Journal of Popular Film & Television 35.3 (Fall 2007).

“Antietam, James Island, and Fort Wagner: The Battle Sequences in Edward Zwick’s Glory.” Studies in Popular Culture 30.1 (Fall 2007).

“Albert the Prince: England’s Unsung Hero of the American Civil War.” North & South Magazine 10.2 (July 2007).

“Algeria Revisited: Opposing Commanders as Antithetical Doubles in Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers.” Journal of Film and Video 58.3 (Fall 2006).

“Future Shock on the National Mall: Washington, D.C., as Disputed Ideological Space in Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still.” Journal of Popular Film & Television 34.2 (Summer 2006).

“Ariel and Prospero’s Modern-English Adventure: Language, Social Criticism, and Adaptation in Paul Mazursky’s Tempest.” Literature/Film Quarterly 34.2 (April 2006).

“The Power of Armies Visible: Civil War Iconography and Visual Literacy in the Undergraduate English Classroom.” Pennsylvania English 28.1-2 (Fall 2005/Spring 2006).
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“Gothicism in Rebel Gray: Postbellum Evolution of the Southern Gothic in the Early Fiction of George Washington Cable.” South Dakota Review 43.1-2 (Spring/Summer 2005).

“Studies in Outlawry: The Strange Career of Josey Wales.” Quarterly Review of Film & Video 22.2 (April-June 2005).

“Roller Coasters and Civil Rights: John Waters’s Hairspray and the Desegregation of the Gwynn Oak Amusement Park.” Studies in American Culture 26.2 (October 2003).

“George Washington Cable and Bonaventure: A New Orleans Author’s Literary Sojourn into Acadiana.” Southern Literary Journal 35.1 (Fall 2002).

“Y2K + 1: Community College Students, Millennial Anxiety, and Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.” Teaching English in the Two-Year College 29.3 (March 2002).

“From Hero to Villain to Unknown Other: The Confederate Soldier in American Film.” Studies in Popular Culture 19.2 (October 1996).

Grants and Fellowships

Nyberg Grant, 2004. In cooperation with four other Millikin University faculty members, applied for and received a grant involving collaborative summer work toward standardization of Critical Writing 1 assignments around issues of critical literacy. Awarded $2500.

Courses Taught

English 101 (Composition)

English 201 (Reading and Writing About Texts)
English 302-M (Advanced Composition -- Multidisciplinary)
English 302-S (Advanced Composition -- Social Sciences)

Education

Ph.D., University of Maryland, 1996

M.F.A., University of Maryland, 1991

B.A., College of William & Mary, 1983

Recent Presentations

2017 “Centaurs in Pennsylvania: Classical Mythology and the Mid-Atlantic Landscape in John Updike’s The Centaur.” Mid-Atlantic Popular and American Culture conference, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

2016 “The Berlin Summer of Thomas Wolfe: The ‘I Have a Thing to Tell You’ Section of You Can't Go Home Again, and Wolfe’s Pre-World War II Impressions of Nazi Germany.” Appalachian Studies Association conference, Shepherdstown, West Virginia.

2015 “Calibans of the South: Faulkner’s Joe Christmas, Styron’s Nat Turner, and the Great Unwritten Southern Novel.” Popular Culture in the South conference, Wilmington, North Carolina.

2014 Chaired panel on “Power, Politics, and Public Policy” and delivered paper “The Candidate from the Party of the Self: Silas P. Ratcliffe in Henry Adams’s Democracy: An American Novel.” Mid-Atlantic Popular and American Culture Association conference, Baltimore, Maryland.

2013 “A Gettysburg for Novelists: MacKinlay Kantor’s Long Remember and Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels.” Pennsylvania College English Association conference, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.