Dr. Patrick Chura
Title: Distinguished Professor
Dept/Program: English
Office: Olin 353
Phone: 330-972-6242
Email: jpc@uakron.edu
Biography
Patrick Chura teaches courses in nineteenth and twentieth century American literature and culture studies. He is the author of three books and has published articles on a variety of literary-historical topics. His 2011 study, Thoreau the Land Surveyor, won the College English Association of Ohio’s Dasher Award for outstanding literary scholarship. His latest book, Michael Gold: The People’s Writer, won the 2022 Literary Encyclopedia Book Prize and the 2022 Paul Cowan Award for Non-Fiction.
Chura’s recent scholarly publications include the article, “Blackness and Belonging: Shirley Graham’s ‘Negro Adaptation’ of The Hairy Ape” in the Eugene O’Neill Review.
In 2023, Dr. Chura collaborated with Fermat's Last Theater Co. of Madison, Wisconsin, on the first U.S. production of Albert Maltz's long-suppressed play, “The Morrison Case.” Later that year, he edited and introduced Damned Agitator: A Michael Gold Reader.
Chura’s journalism in People’s World magazine, Project 1492, the Akron Beacon Journal, The Chronicle of Higher Education and the London-based Times Higher Education underscore his contributions to discussions of race, gender and social conflict at the national and international levels.
Professor Chura is also a translator who has made Lithuanian literary texts available in English. In 2009 he won a grant from the European Union for research on Baltic literature and drama, and in 2015 he received funding from the Lithuanian Ministry of Education to preserve memories of a politically decisive 1988 theater festival by establishing the Atgaiva Oral History Archive in the city of Šiauliai.
During a teaching visit to Vietnam in 2016, Chura scripted the oral history play Voices of Vietnam, In War and Peace. After student performances in Ho Chi Minh City and on the UA campus, the play was published in Peace Studies Journal.
In 2017 Chura interviewed Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen and published one of the first critical-biographical assessments of Nguyen’s career to date. In 2019 he authored a commissioned chapter in the Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism entitled “Realism and the Middle-Class Balancing Act.”
Dr. Chura has been a Peace Corps Volunteer in Eastern Europe and has been awarded three Fulbright grants, to Lithuania in 2009, the United Kingdom in 2012, and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam in 2016. He serves on the editorial boards of The Eugene O’Neill Review, The Literary Encyclopedia, and Lituanus.
Video Files:
As a Fulbright lecturer, Professor Chura visits Vietnam’s Cu Chi tunnels with students and faculty of Ho Chi Minh City Open University. (May 2016)
Film trailer, Henry Thoreau: Surveyor of the Soul (2017). Chura, a scholarly consultant for the film, speaks at 1:50.
Education
Ph.D., St. Louis University