David lavery

David Lavery (1949- ) was born in Oil City, Pennsylvania and graduated from Oil City High School in 1967. After two years at Venango Campus of Clarion State College, he transferred to Clarion, receiving his B.S. in English in 1971. He went on to earn the M.A. at St. Cloud University in Minnesota and the Ph.D. at the University of Florida, where he was chosen for Phi Beta Kappa on the strength of his dissertation ("To Discover That There is Nothing to Discover": The Imagination, the Open, and the Movies of Federico Fellini).
He is married (1979- ) to the former Joyce Kling, executive director of a Nashville, Tennessee non-profit, and is father to two daughters, Rachel Alden Lavery, an attorney in New York and Sarah Caitlin Lavery, an assistant producer for WSMV (NBC) in Nashville.
He has taught at the College of St. Benedict in Minnesota (1975-76), the University of North Florida (1979-1980), Seattle University (1980-1981), East China Normal University (in Shanghai, 1981), the University of Alabama in Huntsville (1981-1983), Northern Kentucky University (1983-1988), Memphis State University (now the University of Memphis, 1988-1993), Brunel University in London (2006-2008), and Middle Tennessee State University (1993-2006, 2008- ), where he is now professor of English.
His intellectual interests include poetry, literary theory and criticism, creativity, film history and theory, television studies, and the evolution of consciousness.
He is the author of well over a hundred essays, reviews, and book chapters on a wide variety of topics--Mad Men, Veronica Mars, Dexter, Life on Mars, cult television and film, narratology, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Winnie Holzman, Billy Jack, Nanook of the North, television tie-in books, film adaptations of Moby-Dick and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Alias, 24, David Milch, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, Angel, Six Feet Under, exosomatic evolution, professional wrestling, Desparate Housewives, George W. Bush, Johnny Carson, Loren Eiseley, television creativity, intertextuality, Baywatch, parody, science fiction, W. R. Robinson, remote control devices, gnosticism, the Coen Brothers, comic book aesthetics, crying, time-lapse photography, Northern Exposure, hatred of television, television series, irony, The Far Side, academic cults, René Descartes, television genres, NYPD Blue, Forrest Gump, Groundhog Day, film adaptation, Wallace Stevens, Benjamin Whorf, The Matrix, eXistenz, My Left Foot, creativity, Howard Gruber, Federico Fellini, the grotesque, Rainer Maria Rilke, autobiography, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, epigraphs, reading, extinction, Owen Barfield, Annie Dillard, advertising, longing, horror film, dissertations, Solaris, O Lucky Man.
Lavery is as well the author/co-author/editor/co-editor of seventeen books published or under contract, including:

Late for the Sky: The Mentality of the Space Age (Southern Illinois U P, 1992)

Full of Secrets: Critical Approaches to Twin Peaks (Wayne State U P, 1994)

Deny All Knowledge': Reading The X-Files (Syracuse U P, 1996)

Fighting the Forces: What’s at Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Rowman & Littlefield, 2002)

Teleparody: Predicting/Preventing the TV Discourse of Tomorrow (Wallflower, Columbia U P, 2002)

This Thing of Ours: Investigating The Sopranos (Wallflower, Columbia U P, 2002)

Seinfeld, Master of Its Domain: Revisiting Television's Greatest Sitcom (Continuum, 2006)

Unlocking the Meaning of Lost: An Unauthorized Guide (Sourcebooks, 2006. 2007)

Reading Deadwood: A Western to Swear By (I. B. Tauris, 2006)

Reading The Sopranos: Hit TV from HBO (I. B. Tauris, 2006)

Dear Angela: Remembering My So Called Life (Lexington Books, 2007)

Saving the World: A Guide to Heroes (ECW Press, 2007)

Lost’s Buried Treasures: The Unofficial Guide to Everything Lost Fans Need to Know (Sourcebooks, 2007, 2008)

The Essential Cult TV Reader (U Press of Kentucky, 2009)

Joss: A Creative Portrait of the Maker of the Whedonverses (I. B. Tauris/St. Martin's, 2009)

The Essential Sopranos Reader (U Press of Kentucky, 2010)

Lavery co-wrote and co-produced (with G. B. Tennyson) a documentary, Owen Barfield: Man and Meaning (directed and edited by Ben Levin, University of North Texas, and shot by Wayne Derrick). The film won the Bronze Award for Independent Video at Worldfest Houston (1996) and received an Honorable Mention at the Columbus International Film and Video Festival (1996).
Lavery was the co-founder and co-editor (with Rhonda Wilcox) of the e-journal Slayage: The Online International Journal of Buffy Studies and is one of the founding editors of Critical Studies in Television: Scholarly Studies of Small Screen Fictions. The co-organizer (with Wilcox) of international conferences on Buffy held in 2004, 2006, and 2008 and (with Doug Howard and Paul Levinson) and The Sopranos (in New York, 2008). With Wilcox and Tanya Cochran, he also founded the Whedon Studies Association. He has been a guest on the BBC, National Public Radio, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Radio Scotland, VH1, SKY TV, and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and a source for The New York Times, The Tennessean, Stitch, The Florida Times, The Hartford Courant, A Folha de Sao Paulo (Brazil), Publico (Portugal), USA Today, The Baltimore Sun, and other publications.
He has lectured around the world on the subject of television: invited talks at the Myths of Creativity and Dead Bodies: Presentation and Representation symposia at the University of Heidelberg, at the Blood, Text, and Fears conference at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, and at the University of Cardiff, Wales; keynote addresses at Sonic Synergies and Creative Cultures and Staking a Claim: Exploring the Global Reach of Buffy at the University of South Australia in Adelaide; the Contemporary American Quality Television International Conference at Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland; Giving and Taking Offence, University of Aveiro, Portugal; and Buffy Hereafter: From the Whedonverse to the Whedonesque, Istanbul, Turkey.

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