THE NATURE OF THE WEBSITE

This website showcases the range and variety of Paul Cantor’s work as critic, scholar, and thinker. It moves from the tragedy of King Lear to the comedy of The Simpsons, from the gods of the ancient Greeks to the zombies of The Walking Dead. The scope of Cantor’s work is unusual. He is the only person who has published on both of the John Fords, the Renaissance playwright and the Hollywood director.

Cantor is a professor of literature, having taught in the English departments of both the University of Virginia and Harvard. As such, he is best-known for his scholarship on Shakespeare and drama in general, as well as on Romanticism. But he is also known for his work in political theory; he has published on such figures as Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, Hegel, Tocqueville, and Nietzsche. He taught a course on Shakespeare and Politics in Harvard’s Government department in 2007, 2012, and 2015. He is an active member of the American Political Science Association, and was one of the founders of its Politics, Literature, and Film section. He won the award for the best paper at that section’s sessions at the APSA’s 1998 Annual Meeting.

Cantor is also well-known in economic circles, especially among followers of the Austrian School. He is a member of the adjunct faculty of an economics think-tank, the Mises Institute, and won its Ludwig von Mises Prize for Scholarship in Austrian School Economics in 1992 and gave the Ludwig von Mises Memorial Lecture at its Austrian Scholars Conference in 2002. While he was still in high school, Cantor studied with Mises at his NYU graduate seminar in 1961-62. He has pioneered the application of the principles of Austrian economics to the study of literature and culture in general.

What has surprised people most about Cantor is his extensive work on popular culture, both films and television. In 2003, Cantor received a phone call from a representative of The New York Times, enquiring whether he had ever written anything about The Simpsons. The Times was investigating their disgraced reporter, Jayson Blair, who had been exposed as a plagiarist. Worried about their reputation and legal liability, the Times was tracking down all the people Blair had claimed to be quoting in his stories. Someone on their staff had been alarmed to find out that Blair had attributed in print a positive opinion of The Simpsons to Cantor, a reputable Shakespeare scholar. Cantor explained that he had indeed published an essay on the TV show in an academic journal called Political Theory in 1999, and it had been reprinted many times elsewhere. Cantor had to break the news to the Times that they had been scooped on this story by The National Enquirer, which had already run a piece about him, headlined: “And Top Prof Says: Watching Homer & Marge May Be Good For Family Values.”

This website is designed to put to rest the minds of people at The New York Times and elsewhere who have been wondering if there are more than one Paul A. Cantor out there publishing. Yes, the Paul A. Cantor who writes about Averroism in Dante’s Divine Comedy is the same Paul A. Cantor who writes about Walter White as a tragic hero in Breaking Bad. Cantor has for decades been exploring the interaction and interrelation between so-called “high” culture and “low” culture. This website allows users to follow him on his journey from the ancient Greeks to contemporary television.