Skip to Content

English Department

Contact Information

Email
phone: 322-2327
308 Benson Science Hall

Office Hours

Monday 12:30-2:00, Wednesday 1:30-3:00, and by appointment.

Paul Young

Associate Professor
Director of Film Studies

Paul Young first saw H. R. Pufnstuf: The Movie in an unairconditioned theater in March of 1975, and realized a few moments after being seated that the film merely anthologized old episodes of the TV series. This is probably when he decided to make his living either producing films or complaining about them. Forgetting this lesson and finding reason to believe he would require training in a remunerative profession, Young discovered, to his chagrin, that architecture students were expected to design buildings that refuse to collapse. Young consequently received his BA in English at the University of Iowa in 1990. At Iowa, Dudley Andrew's tutelage in European film history made clear to him that, had Francois Truffaut had to sit through H. R. Pufnstuf: The Movie as a child, he would likely have figured that the French cinema de quality was just dandy by comparison and might never have launched the French New Wave. While today Young produces no films, nor does he find nearly so much to complain about as one might expect considering the success of the Transformers series, he believes that critical analysis and historical research provide a pleasing middle ground.

Representative publications

Selected Publications:

  • Film Sound. In Oxford Bibliographies Online: Cinema and Media Studies. Ed. Krin Gabbard. New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming.
  • "Das flimmernde Fenster. Die realistischen Fantasien des frohen Kinos" [The Flickering Window: Early Cinema's Realist Fantasies] (German translation by Wilhelm Werthern), in Das Kino trumt: Projektion. Imagination. Vision [Cinema Dreams: Projection, Imagination, Vision], ed. Winfried Pauleit, Christine Roffert, and Karl-Heinz Schmid (Berlin: Bertz & Fischer, 2009) 78-95.
  • Essays on Applause (1929) and Star Wars (1977) in Fifty Key American Films, ed. John White and Sabine Haenni (Routledge, Spring 2009).
  • "Film Genre Theory and Contemporary Media: Description, Interpretation, Intermediality," The Oxford Handbook of Film and Media Studies, ed. Robert Kolker (Oxford UP, 2008).
  • "Telling Descriptions: Frank Norris's Kinetoscopic Naturalism and the Future of the Novel, 1899," Modernism/Modernity 14.4 (November 2007): 645-668.
  • The Cinema Dreams Its Rivals: Media Fantasy Films from Radio to the Internet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
  • "No One Sees the Camps: Hitler and Humor in White Noise." Approaches to Teaching DeLillo's White Noise. Ed. John Duvall and Timothy Engles. New York: MLA Press, 2005.
  • "Media on Display: A Telegraphic History of Early American Cinema." New Media 1740-1915. Ed. Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey B. Pingree. Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 2003.
  • "(Not) The Last Noir Essay: Film Noir and the Crisis of Postwar Interpretation." minnesota review 55-57 (2002): 203-221.
  • "The Negative Reinvention of Cinema: Late Hollywood in the Early Digital Age." Convergence (UK) 5.2 (Summer 1999): 24-50.