John C. Tibbetts


John C. Tibbetts is an American film critic, historian, author, painter, and pianist. He is currently a film professor at The University of Kansas.

Career

After receiving a Ph.D. in 1982 from the University of Kansas in multi-disciplinary studies—art history, theater, photography, and film -Tibbetts was tenured as an associate professor. Under the general rubric of “visual literacy,” his course work includes film history, media studies, and theory and aesthetics.
Before entering the academy, Tibbetts worked from 1980 to 1996 as a full-time broadcaster. He was an arts and entertainment editor and producer for a variety of radio and television outlets, including KCTV, KMBC Radio, and KXTR-FM radio. During that time he also contributed many broadcast stories about musicians, painters, playwrights, and filmmakers to CBS Television, the Monitor Radio Network, Voice of America, and National Public Radio. More recently, he has produced two radio series about music, including the 15-part The World of Robert Schumann and the 17-part Piano Portraits, that have been broadcast worldwide and are now a part of the permanent collection of the Rodgers & Hammerstein Archives in Lincoln Center, New York. Both derive from his knowledge of music and feature numerous interviews with musicians and scholars in the musical field.
Music, theater, literature, and film play a substantial part in his 25 books and more than 250 articles. Recent book publications include The Gothic Imagination, which featured his interviews with dozens of prominent figures in literature, music, painting, and film. Individual studies of filmmakers, writers, and composers include Douglas Fairbanks and the American Century, Peter Weir: Interviews, The Gothic Worlds of Peter Straub, and Schumann: A Chorus of Voices. Other book publications include Dvorak in America, which was a multicultural study of the famous Czech composer’s sojourn in America from 1892 to 1895. The eminent cultural historian, Robert Winter, greeted the book enthusiastically: “Of all the books on American music at the turn of the century, none brings together so many interesting and richly interrelated dimensions as Dvorak in America.” An historical overview of the interactions of theater and film is explored in The American Theatrical Film, which is currently being used by Professor Charles Musser as a text in his courses at Yale University.
Film adaptations of theater and literature are the subjects of his various edited reference works, including The Encyclopedia of Novels into Film, The Cinema of Tony Richardson, The Encyclopedia of Stage Plays into Film, and Shakespeare into Film. The dramatization on film of the lives of classical and popular composers, Composers in the Movies: Studies in Musical Biography, is the first scholarly study of the subject. It was praised by the dean of cultural studies, Professor Jacques Barzun, as “a welcome and worthwhile endeavor.” It received second prize from the prestigious International Association of Media Historians for “Best Book on Media Studies” in 2007.
Tibbetts continues to pursue his work as a painter, illustrator, and writer of fiction. He has published several short stories, in Twilight Zone magazine, Weird Fiction Review, and been anthologized in Ballantine Books' anthology series, The Year’s Best Horror Stories, Series Eight. He has executed many covers and interior illustrations for his articles and books. His work has been featured in gallery exhibitions in Kansas City and at the University of Kansas, where the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences has reserved a wall for his paintings. He has had a lifelong passion for portraits, and claims to have painted thousands of them, on commission and on his own. He has exploited his opportunities as a broadcast interviewer to draw hundreds of images of popular actors, filmmakers, musicians, many personally inscribed and autographed. These images, numbering in excess of 700, are currently housed in the University of Kansas Spencer Research Library, where they are available for scholarly study and exhibition. His hundreds of video and audio interviews with prominent figures in the film, music, and literary fields can be accessed on his web site, "Over the Rainbow," as part of the University of Kansas Digital Initiatives program.
His ability as a pianist of twelve years' training has resulted in a secondary career accompanying silent movies at venues including the American Film Institute Theatre in Washington, D.C., the Silent Film Festival in Topeka, Kansas, and the annual Buster Keaton Celebrations in Iola, Kansas.
In addition to his teaching responsibilities and mentoring activities at the University of Kansas, Tibbetts brings his knowledge and experience in the arts to a wider community service. For the Kansas Humanities Council he has lectured and presented topics on the arts and local history to many communities around the state, such as Garden Grove, Ottawa, and Council Grove. For more than twenty years he has appeared as an arts commentator and critic on the Walt Bodine Show on KCUR-FM radio, Kansas City, and, more recently, as a reporter and film critic on Kansas Public Radio. He organized the “Buster Keaton Celebrations,” held annually in Iola, Kansas since 1992 and sponsored by the Kansas Humanities Council. In the 1980s he provided program notes for the concerts of the Kansas City Camerata Chamber Orchestra.
Tibbetts was the recipient of Kansas Educator of the Year in 2008.

Broadcast series

Publications on music