FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE                                                                 April 25, 2005

NORTHWESTERN ENGLISH PROFESSOR WRITES SIX ESSAYS FOR PUBLICATIONS

Dr. James Yates, chair of the English, Foreign Language and Humanities Department at Northwestern Oklahoma State University, has had six essays published that are now available in the J.W. Martin Library on the Alva campus.

One of the books in which Yates’ essays are published is called The Encyclopedia of Stage Plays into Film by John Tibbetts and James Welsh. In this book, Yates has written one essay about Shakespeare’s “King Lear” and its adaptation into film. The second essay is about “Shadowlands” by William Nicholson, which was originally a stage play, then made into a television movie on the BBC. In 1993 it was made into a film.

In another book about arctic explorers called The Encyclopedia of the Arctic, edited by Mark Nuttall, Yates has contributed three articles. The first one is on Francis Leopold McClintock.

“McClintock was the guy who did more in terms of exploration on sleds than anyone else,” Yates said. “His big claim to fame was finding the Lost Franklin Expedition.”

The second article written for this book is on Sir William Edward Parry, who was one of the most famous explorers of the 19^th century. The third is about an Italian explorer named Umberto Nobile.

“Nobile tried to explore the arctic by air ship,” Yates said. “His story was made into a movie back in 1968 starring Sean Connery called ‘The Red Tent’.”

The third book in which Yates has been published is called The Columbia Companion to American History in Film, edited by Peter C. Rawlins, a book that has had a lot of reviews. Rawlins is the Regent’s Professor of English at Oklahoma State University, and he was Yates’ adviser on his dissertation when he attended OSU.

“He called me up in 1998, gave me a topic and asked me to write an essay,” Yates said. “So I worked on it for about a year and sent it in and just kind of forgot about it until last November. He called me up and told me it had been published.”

The essay Yates has written in this book is about the Mexican American War and the Spanish American War in film.

-NW-

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