Scholarly Essays and Articles
Scholarly essays aren't what you would typically think of as "artwork," but I feel there is a certain art to writing a great paper. And, oh boy, it's an art at which I'm well practiced. I would estimate that I've written well over 300 scholarly essays in my studies.
I'm sure that you would find many of my papers a little boring---so I've only included the essays here that I think might possibly have some broad appeal. Some of them are pretty interesting, in my opinion. So... enjoy. Merely click on the thumbnail image to view the complete work.
"In the World But Not of the World: LDS Cinema and the Globalized Audience"
Work in Progress; 15 pages
This is the latest draft of an article I wrote which will be published in a future issue of BYU Studies, although I'm still not sure which one it will be in. In this article, I suggest that in order to mature and development as a film movement, LDS Cinema needs to begin addressing the inernational LDS audience. I really like this article and I've been working on it FOREVER. You can read the sneak preview here.
"Lawyer Jokes in the Age of Political Correctness"
March 2004; 7 pages
I wrote this quickie paper for my Folklore Studies Seminar at the U. This class was pretty laid-back for a graduate seminar. Maybe that's why it's definitely the best graduate class I ever took. :) Anyhow, in this class we had to write a short paper at the end of every section in the class. This is the paper I wrote at the end of our Jokes section. I analyzed several different lawyer jokes and came up with a sociopolitical theory about why lawyer jokes developed as a joke genre. It's a pretty fun little paper, so I hope you enjoy it.
"Shakespearean Cinema and the (De)Construction of British Nationalism"
December 2004; 20 pages
I include this paper as an example of some of the more serious scholarly work which I've done. I enjoyed writing this paper so much that for a long time I was thinking of expanding it into a dissertation. I guess we'll never know how good it might have been. Anyhow, this paper explores the relationship of Shakespearean Cinema to the construction of British identity. To date it is one of the longest papers I ever wrote for a class. I first wrote this paper for my British Literature seminar at the U. I was one of the few students who got an A in the class, so I guess I must have done something right. Anyhow, enjoy...