Dr. John Springer earned his Ph.D. in English from the University of Iowa in 1994. He was a Visiting Assistant Professor of English and a Visiting Lecturer in the Film and Video Studies Program at the University of Oklahoma before coming to UCO in fall 2000.

Dr. Springer's principal areas of research are film history and theory, 19th and early 20th century American literature, and the broad, interdisciplinary field known as Cultural Studies. He wrote the introduction to Raymond Williams in the well-known anthologyLiterary Criticism and Theory: Greeks to the Present as well as numerous articles and reviews for journals such as Genre, Iris, andLiterature/Film Quarterly.

Most recently, Dr. Springer has published his first book: Hollywood Fictions: The Dream Factory in American Literature (University of Oklahoma Press, 2000). This work integrates Dr. Springer's interests in film and literature by examining a genre of American fiction specifically devoted to exploring the relationship between them. Looking at novels and short stories set in Hollywood from the teens through the 1940s,Hollywood Fictions examines the contradictory ways in which Hollywood was represented and analyzes the conflicting images and ideas it produced in the popular culture of the twenties, thirties, and forties.

Dr. Springer has also presented papers at several national and international conferences. Last October, he was one of the academic presenters at the Alfred Hitchcock Centennial Celebration hosted by New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. In all of his scholarly work Dr. Springer explores the multiple intersections between visual and print cultures, and he is interested in discovering how a broad range of cultural practices (film, literature, visual arts, music) are embedded in specific social and historical contexts.

(Here is the link to UCO's Film Studies site.)