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.