Graduate Program in English

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richard vela

Richard R. Vela, Professor Email: richard.vela@uncp.edu Phone: 910.521.6600 Office: Dial Humanities 121A

 

EDUCATION

B.A., M.A. The University of Dallas
Ph.D. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Dr. Vela believes that successful teaching both instructs and inspires. He invites an intellectual and emotional engagement with subject matter and ideas, and he is unashamed of using any method appropriate to getting students to see things they could not see before. At the same time, he realizes that any genuine re-visioning of things is finally the result of student effort rather than instructional ingenuity. He often uses humor in the classroom and jokes that confusion and anxiety are important parts of the learning process. As a student, he won both the Danforth Foundation Fellowship and the Ford Foundation Fellowship. As a professor, he has been a popular teacher and won the University Teaching Award (1998), the Board of Governors Award for Teaching Excellence (2000), and the Research and Creativity Award (2007). Dr. Vela publishes primarily in the areas of Shakespeare and film. He is co-author of Shakespeare into Film (2002), contributing editor of The Encyclopedia of Stage Plays into Film (2001), wrote all of the articles on Shakespeare adaptations in The Encyclopedia of Orson Welles (2003), and is area chair for Shakespeare on Film and Television for the South West/Texas Popular Culture Association. He is also on the editorial board of the Literature / Film Quarterly. In 2002, he was part of the NEH Institute, “Shakespeare’s Theatres: Inside and Out,” which investigated original staging at the replica of the Blackfriars in Staunton, VA and at Shakespeare’s New Globe Theatre in London, and in the summer of 2005 he took a graduate class to England, visiting London, Stratford-Upon-Avon, and Oxford among other places. For the last several years he has presented and published a number of papers on the intersections between the United States and Latin America in film and literature. In 2001, for example, he presented a paper in Puebla, Mexico, on the representation of Mexico in the films of Sam Peckinpah, and in 2006, he presented a paper on John Huston’s Mexico at the Huston School of Film and Digital Media in Galway, Ireland. Most recently he has published an essay on apocalyptic elements in Baz Luhrmann’s film, William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (McFarland 2009), and with Anthony Guneratne (Florida Atlantic University) he is currently working on a book about Shakespeare and genre.

Updated: Wednesday, June 17, 2009

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