The Hollywood Cinema of the 1930s: Two Important Pioneers and Their Work

Dr. David Soren is Regents Professor of Classics with the University of Arizona and Director of the Orvieto Institute in Umbria. He holds a B.A. in Greek & Roman Studies from Dartmouth, and an M.A. in Fine Arts and Ph.D. in Classical Archaeology from Harvard University. His specialties include Roman Archaeology, and the making of documentaries. He has done extensive field work in Cyprus, Portugal, Tunisia and Italy, is widely published, and has received numerous honors and awards for his work (see his listing on Wikipedia).

Regents Professor Soren was honored with the 2005 Excellence in International Service Award.

Professor Soren founded and continues to direct the Orvieto Study Abroad Program in Italy, now the University's largest study abroad program.

Dr. David Soren is a world renowned archaeologist who has been credited with making one of the top 75 discoveries in the history of world archaeology: finding the source of the Great Mediterranean Earthquake of A.D. 365 on the island of Cyprus and detailing the events that led to the rise of Christianity and the fall of Roman paganism on the island (Source: Oxford University Press).

He is a fellow of Great Britain’s Royal Institute of International Affairs and of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies as well as a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome, an honorary Italian citizen and the author of more than 25 books on archaeology and entertainment.

His archaeological excavations have discovered the lost sacred spings of the emperor Augustus in Tuscany and he has explained the decline of the Roman Empire in Italy through his discovery of a burial ground of infants believed to have died from a malaria epidemic in A.D. 450. Dr. Soren holds a B.A. in Greek and Roman Studies from Dartmouth College, an M.A. in Fine Arts from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in Classical Archaeology also from Harvard.

At the University of Arizona where he is Regents Professor of Classics and Anthropology, he regularly teaches as many as 1000 students per year. After finishing his most recent book on his new evidence that a pandemic stopped Attila the Hun from daring to attack Rome, he decided to turn to something different: an archaeologist looking at the life and art of Taylor Swift.

Converted to becoming a Swiftie by his own students, Dr. Soren became fascinated by how much students could learn from studying Taylor’s lyrics and self-created videos and Eras Tour presentations and his new book invites Swifties to do a deeper dive and learn the implications of Swift’s work in Surrealism and the Paranoiac-Critical Method, Steampunk Culture, Retro-Futurism, Art Deco, Expressionist-Cubism, Caligarism, Star Wars, Plato and Neo-Platonism, Aristotle’s Poetics and numerous other topics and he has put all of this into his new book America’s Superstar: A Deeper Dive.

Soren, who has designed and produced multi-million-dollar exhibitions for the American Museum of Natural History in New York City (and a Star Wars show coproduced with the film’s original production designer Harry Lange at the Hayden Planetarium in New York), is a major fan of Swift’s talents and in this textbook, written in clear non-jargony prose especially for Swifties, and featuring 180 illustrations and more than 300 online sources to consult for further deep diving, he shares why he finds Swift’s work such a stepping stone to advanced intellectual engagement.