Prof John Bak
Research Associate
John Bak is a research associate at the School of Literature, Language and Media at Wits University, and a professor at the Université de Lorraine in France, where he teaches courses in literary journalism and American drama and theatre. He holds degrees from the University of Illinois, Ball State University, and the Sorbonne in Paris. In 1995, he was a Fulbright Scholar at Univerzity Palackého in the Czech Republic. He has also been a Visiting Research Fellow at Harvard University (2011), Columbia University (2013), and the University of Texas at Austin (2014). Currently, he is a Visiting Research Fellow at Wolfson College, University of Oxford.
His articles have appeared in journals such as Theatre Journal, Mississippi Quarterly, Journal of American Drama and Theatre, The Tennessee Williams Literary Journal, American Drama, South Atlantic Review, and Studies in Musical Theatre. He has edited several books, including New Selected Essays: Where I Live (New Directions, 2009) and, with Bill Reynolds, Literary Journalism across the Globe: Journalistic Traditions and Transnational Influences (University of Massachusetts Press, 2011). Bak is also the author of the monographs Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, and Queer Masculinities (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009) and Tennessee Williams: A Literary Life (Palgrave, 2013).