Research Expertise and Interest

20th- and 21st-century American literature, African American literature, cultural studies, drama, film

Research Description

Scott Saul's field of research is twentieth century American literature and culture, with a focus on postwar developments in performance, poetry, music, and film. His book, Becoming Richard Pryor (HarperCollins, 2014), is a biography of the artist who revolutionized American comedy. 

His interests run to the great cultural watershed that was modernism in the arts -- whether it took the form of William Carlos Williams's poetry, Charlie Chaplin's films, or Duke Ellington's music -- and to the starburst of creative activity that has followed up to the present. He's especially interested in the connections between 20th- and 21st-century artistic movements and 20th- and 21st-century social movements — or, on the individual level, how particular artists are catalyzed by the history they are living through.

He teach courses in 20th- and 21st-century American literature and cultural history, ranging from "The Culture of the Cold War" and "The Seventies" to "Fictions of Los Angeles," "American Avant-Gardes" and "Race and Performance in the 20th-century U.S." He has also taught a seminar on the history of Berkeley and the East Bay in the 1960s and 1970s, whose class project was the creation of "The Berkeley Revolution," a digital history website that hosts over 600 curated primary sources from the time. He enjoys pulling his students together in collaborative writing projects: recent projects include The Godfather: Anatomy of a Film (an outgrowth of his lecture course on the 1970s) and Unlocking Key & Peele (an outgrowth of his lecture course on the age of Obama). He also has taught an undergraduate workshop in creative nonfiction.