Charlie in the Heartland Chaplin Bio

Charles J. Maland Biography

            Chuck Maland is a Professor of English, Cinema Studies, and American Studies at the University of Tennessee , specializing in movies and their relationship to American culture.  He will complete his current three-year term as Head of the English Department in the summer of 2010, after which he will return with enthusiasm to teaching and writing.  His books include American Visions: The Films of Chaplin, Ford, Capra and Welles, 1936-1941 (1977), Frank Capra (1980), and Chaplin and American Culture: The Evolution of a Star Image (1989), which was nominated for a number of awards and won the Theater Library Association Award for best book that year in the are of “recorded performance” (film, television, or radio).  His most recent book, City Lights (2007), appears in the British Film Institute’s Film Classics series and is based in part on a close archival research into Chaplin’s studio records, housed at the Cineteca di Bologna in Bologna , Italy . 

            Dr. Maland has also won a number of teaching awards, including the Alumni Association Outstanding Teacher Award, and has held a Chair of Teaching Excellence in the English Department and a Lindsay Young Professorship in the College of Arts and Sciences at Tennessee .  He lives in Knoxville with his wife, Nancy Klein Maland, an elementary school principal, is an avid tennis player, and enjoys, of course, going to the movies.

            It might be worth mentioning that Dr. Maland first became seriously interested in Chaplin’s career when he had a chance to see most of Chaplin’s feature films and a number of the First National Films when they were released in Ann Arbor, where he was attending the University of Michigan, just before Chaplin’s return to the U.S. in 1972 to accept an honorary Oscar.  He’s been fascinated with Chaplin, his movies, and his on-again, off-again relationship with American culture since that time.