About

David L. Pike

Professor, Department of Literature, American University

Fellow, Society of Fellows, SOF/Heyman, Columbia University (1993–1995)

Professor Pike's most recent book is Canadian Cinema since the 1980s: At the Heart of the World (U of Toronto P, 2012). He is the author of Metropolis on the Styx: The Underworlds of Modern Urban Culture, 1800–2001 (Cornell UP, 2007); Subterranean Cities: The World Beneath Paris and London 1800–1945 (Cornell UP), shortlisted for the 2006 Modernist Studies Association book prize; Passage through Hell: Modernist Descents, Medieval Underworlds (Cornell UP), recipient of the 1997 Gustave O. Arlt Award in the Humanities from the Council of Graduate Schools and a Choice Outstanding Academic Book for 1997; and articles on medieval literature, modernism, film, and Paris and London. He is co-author of Literature: A World of Writing and co-general editor of the Longman Anthology of World Literature. In addition to urban culture and the underground, he teaches courses on European and Canadian cinema, film noir, the western, modernism, Dante, Roman literature, and the novel. From 1993 to 1995, Professor Pike was Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University. His most recent publication is Cold War Space and Culture in the 1960s and 1980s: The Bunkered Years (Oxford University Press, 2021), which studies the two periods in which Americans were actively encouraged to build backyard shelters while governments exhausted their budgets on fortified super-shelters and megaton bombs.