Dr Paul Flaig

Dr Paul Flaig

Director of Impact

Director of Research

Lecturer in Film Studies

Researcher profile

Phone
+44 (0)1334 46 7482
Email
pf49@st-andrews.ac.uk
Office
Ground floor
Location
99 North Street
Office hours
By appointment only

 

Biography

Paul Flaig is Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of St Andrews. He is the author of Weimar Slapstick and Hollywood Comedy Transformed (Bloomsbury "World Cinema" series, 2025), co-editor, with Katherine Groo, of the award-winning edited collection, New Silent Cinema (Routledge / AFI Film Reader, 2015) and co-director, with Dora Osborne, of the German Screen Studies Network (GSSN). Paul completed his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at Cornell University in 2013. Prior to joining the department at St Andrews, he was Lecturer in Film & Visual Culture at the University of Aberdeen from 2013 to 2017.

Paul's writing has appeared in many journals and edited collections, including Cinema Journal, Screen, Camera Obscura, animation, and Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (JCMS). Between 2017 and 2022 he was co-editor of Professional Notes for JCMS and received, as an editorial board member, a SCMS Distinguished Service Award. With Dora Osborne and Molly Harrabin he is currently preparing publication of a new biannual journal, German Screen Studies (Berghahn). This journal is supported by the second of two DAAD Promoting German Studies grants for GSSN activities (2022-2024, 2025-2027).

Exploring the transformative impact of American slapstick, cartoon and screwball cinemas on cultures and legacies of Germany's Weimar Republic (1919-1933), Weimar Slapstick and Hollywood Comedy Transformed is the culmination of Paul's long-standing interest in histories and theories of film comedy. Across a series of essays he has re-read foundational texts in the philosophy of comedy (Freud, Lacan, Bergson, Adorno, Benjamin, Cavell) vis-a-vis works by Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Disney, Pixar, the Marx Brothers, Jackie Chan and others. Most recently, he has published an essay entitled "From the Tramp to Trump: On Screen Comedy and Sovereignty" for The Oxford Handbook of Screen Comedy (2025). He is also working on a new project entitled Slapstick After Fordism, which extends his interests in comedy into an examination of slapstick’s post-industrial legacies in world cinema.

Beginning with New Silent Cinema, Paul has also developed a series of essays exploring contemporary and historical returns to early and silent film across popular and avant-garde cinemas, art, literature and new media. His own contribution to New Silent Cinema has initiated an ongoing series of essays mapping the conditions and possibilities of a feminist media archaeology, which he has written about via theoretical texts by Friedrich Kittler and Wolfgang Ernst, found footage experiments by Bill Morrison, Gustav Deutsch, and Caroline Martel, digital restorations of Thomas Edison's phonographic dolls, and films by Zoe Beloff.

Paul is currently working on a new project provisionally entitled "Permanent Déjà Vu," which will explore the contemporary prevalence for time-loop narratives in film, streaming platforms, gaming and literature through a genealogy of depictions of déjà vu in preceding realist, modernist and post-modern novels, short fiction, cinema and television.

PhD supervision

  • Camila Contreras-Langlois
  • Ilinca Vanau

Selected publications

 

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