Headshot of Shawn Tucker

Shawn Tucker

Associate Professor of Art

Department: Art

Office and address: Elon West-406 W. Haggard Ave., office 102C 2810 Campus Box Elon, NC 27244

Phone number: (336) 278-5741

Brief Biography

I have been at Elon since 2000, and I love it here! I'm so grateful for the students I get to work with and my amazing colleagues. I have taught courses that introduce the Humanities with the theme of laughter and a seminar on Aspects of Laughter. I have also taught The Global Experience and, for the Elon College Fellows program, I have taught Paths of Inquiry. Previously I taught Core seminars on Pride, Humility, and the Good life as well as the Virtues and Vices in the Arts. My scholarly interests include laughter, pride and humility, and the virtues and vices in the arts, and Radiohead. In addition to my scholarly interest, in 2014 I initiated Elon's Faculty-Staff Pick Up Soccer, and we've been playing three times a week since then.  Before coming to Elon, I spent 2 years, from 1987-89, as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Santiago, Chile. I attended Brigham Young University from 1990 to 1993, earning a BA in Humanities. I attended Florida State University from 1993-1997, earning MA and PhD degrees in Humanities. From 1997-2000 I taught at Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. My wife Nicole and I have four children and three grandchildren. 

    Education

    Ph.D. (Humanities) Florida State University, August 1997

    • Coursework in Art History, Contemporary Critical Theory, and Modern British Literature
    • Dissertation:  “Amédée Ozenfant’s Purist Paintings and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land as Modernist and Avant-Garde Responses to World War One”
    • Director: Stan Gontarski; Advisors: Sally McRorie and Eugene J. Crook

    M.A. (Humanities) Florida State University, April 1995

    • Coursework in Twentieth-Century Humanities, Modernism and Postmodernism, and Twentieth-Century Spanish Literature

    B.A. (Humanities) Brigham Young University, 1993

    Coursework in Humanities, American and British Literature, and Art History

    Courses Taught

    Present (Selected Classes)

    • IDS 120 Laughter and the Humanities From Aristophanes to Family Guy, laughter has been an integral part of the arts from the earliest works to the present.  This course introduces the fine arts, including literature, music, film, and the visual and performing arts, with an examination of how the arts use approaches like parody, satire, slapstick, and dark humor to express, entertain, instruct, and subvert. 
    • COR 347 Aspects of Laughter An interdisciplinary examination of a range of ideas for why we laugh and what laughter means.  Students examine the philosophical, psychological, sociological, ethical, and other aspects of laughter.
    • COR 110 The Global Experience  

    Current Projects

    In 2022 I published my fourth book Can Laughter Make the World a Better Place? 

    Grants Awarded

    • Collaborative Humanities Redesign Project, August 2014-August 2017. This project that brings together several Elon faculty with faculty from the University of Kansas, Park University, and Rockhurst University to develop new classroom approaches to the humanities with an emphasis on engaged learning,
    • Enduring Questions Grant to develop a course dealing with “Pride, Humility, and the Good Life” from the National Endowment for the Humanities, March 2010-March 2012

    Publications

    Scholarly Books

    • The Virtues and Vices in the Arts: A Sourcebook.  Cascade Press, January 2015.
    • Pride and Humility: A New Interdisciplinary Analysis.  Palgrave, June 2016.

    Scholarly Articles in Peer-Reviewed Journals (since 2010)

    • “Social Learning via Improved Daily Writing Assignments, Implementation of Study Groups, and Well-Structured Daily Class Discussions.” Insight: A Journal of Scholarly Teaching 13 2018. 28-39.
    • “Encouraging Students to Collaboratively Use Twenty-First Century Learning Tools.” Interdisciplinary Humanities 34:3 (Fall) 2017. 110-116.
    • “The Aesthetics of Dissociation: Radiohead’s ‘How To Disappear Completely’ And Jasper Johns’ Device Paintings.” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 96:1 2013: 85-98.
    • “On Mormon Laughter.” BYU Studies 51:4 (Fall) 2012. 141-154.
    • “Home and Adventure: Mormon Contributions to the Virtues and Vices Tradition.” Dialogue—A Journal of Mormon Thought 45:1 (Spring) 2012. 1-25
    • “Contrasting Utopias: Toward a Theoretical Framework for Modernism, the Avant-Garde, and Postmodernism.” Interdisciplinary Humanities 27:2 (Fall) 2010.  60-78.

    Presentations

    Select Presentations at Scholarly Conferences (Since 2010)

    • “Kant and Dancing House: The Body, Incongruity, and Oscillation.” Humour: An Inclusive Interdisciplinary Conference. Prague, March 2020.
    • “Malcolm in the Middle, Burning Man, and the Bakhtinian Carnivalesque.” Play, Masks and Make-believe: Exploring Boundaries of Fictional Contexts. London, September 2018.
    • “A serious and good MSH presentation consisting entirely of …” Mormon Scholars in the Humanities, Provo, March 2018.
    • “Toward a Mormon Theology of Teaching and Learning.” Mormon Scholars in the Humanities, Boston, May, 2017.
    • “Humourously Disordering Things.” Humour, First Global Conference, Oxford, England, July 2016.
    • “The Waste Land as War Literature: Verdenal, Aldington, Survivor Guilt, and Freudian Defense Mechanism Humor.” Aftermath: The Cultural Legacies of World War One, London, England, May 2015.
    • “The Seven Deadly Sins Three Different Ways.” (a panel I organized and presented at) Conference of the Humanities Education and Research Association, San Francisco, April 2015.
    • “Sigmund Freud and Brené Brown in Zombieland.”  Conference of the Humanities Education and Research Association, Washington DC,  March 2014
    •  “Teaching Ellison’s Invisible Man as a Cautionary Tale of Pride and Humility.” Conference of the Humanities Education and Research Association, Houston, TX, March 2013
    • “Humor’s Humble Persuasion.”  International Congress of Humanities and Social Science Research, Paris, France, July 2012
    • “Death of a Branch Manager: Willy Lowman, Michael Scott, and the Tragicomedy of Narcissism.” Conference of the Humanities Education and Research Association, Salt Lake City, UT, March 2012
    • “Content and Teaching Tools for an Interdisciplinary Humanities Course on Pride, Humility, and the Good Life.” 4th International Conference of Education, Research and Innovation (ICERI2011) Madrid, Spain, November 2011. (Paper published in the conference proceedings.)
    • “On Mormon Laughter.” Conference of the Mormon Scholars in the Humanities, Orem, March 2011
    • “NEH Seminar on Pride, Humility, and the Good Life: Update.” Conference of the Humanities Education and Research Association, San Francisco, March 2011
    • “The Dynamics of Dissociation: Radiohead’s “How to Disappear Completely” and Jasper Johns’ Device Paintings.”  Conference of the Humanities Education and Research Association, El Paso, March 2010