Simon Morgan-Russell Associate Professor, English Associate Dean, College of Arts & Sciences Ph.D., English, Lehigh University M.A., English, Lehigh University B.A. (Hons), English & American Literature, University of Kent at Canterbury (UK) Office: 205 Administration Building Phone: 419-372-0488 E-mail: smorgan Departmental Faculty Page

Research Interests: Comedy: British comic traditions; television comedy and cultural studies; the performance of comedy in British film, television, radio and live media Selection of Recent & Reoccurring Courses: Shakespeare (ENG 301); Studies in Literature-Film (ENG 385); Topics in Film Theory (ENG 485) Biography: The common thread that runs through my work is an interest in comedy as a genre, a mode of expression, or a cultural and political force. As Andy Medhurst remarks in his introduction to the section on comedy in Therese Daniels and Jane Gerson’s The Colour Black: Black Images in British Television, comedy is both a “border guard” that polices the “ideological boundaries . . . between the dominant and subordinate,” and, simultaneously, a source of disruption to the social order and an advocate of social change. Comedy’s slippery, contradictory nature has provided not only the content of my scholarly interest, then, but also my ways of seeing and writing in the critical work I undertake. My early scholarship on seventeenth-century dramatic comedy investigated the intersections of the discourses of sexuality, gender, and urban space – how, as comedies, the plays of Shakespeare, Jonson, and their contemporaries patrolled the borders of their culture’s anxieties or challenged structures of cultural authority. My recent work with British television comedy operates in many of the same ways by exploring how comedy articulates and negotiates contemporary anxieties about (amongst other things) sexuality, masculinity, class, and cultural geography. Selected Publications: Jimmy Perry and David Croft. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004