David Paul

Bio

Dr. Paul’s main interest is the way in which music has contributed to the construction of American identity, both in the 19^th and 20^th centuries.  His book Charles Ives in the Mirror: American Histories of an Iconic Composer is a reception history of Ives that links discourse about the composer to broader discussions concerning what it means to be American.  Also forthcoming is an essay entitled “Censorship and the Politics of Reception: The Filmic Afterlife of Marc Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock,” which will be published in The Oxford Handbook of Music Censorship.  This essay explores how three screenwriters—Ring Lardner Jr., Orson Welles, and Tim Robbins—have interpreted the circumstances surrounding the infamous premiere of Blitzstein’s WPA-era musical.  Dr. Paul has just started a new book project, provisionally titled After the Ball is Over: Memorializing the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Popular Media.  It will examine the ways in which the cultural significance of the exposition has been refigured over the last hundred and twenty years through the agency of dime novels, popular songs, Broadway shows, films, books, and, most recently, video games.  Dr. Paul’s article, “From American Ethnographer to Cold War Icon: Charles Ives through the Eyes of Henry and Sidney Cowell” was published in the Journal of the American Musicological Society.