Title: Communications Educator
Company: Lamar University
Location: Beaumont, Texas, United States
Doktor Lane “Doc” Roth, Communications Educator at Lamar University, has been recognized by Marquis Who’s Who Top Educators for dedication, achievements, and leadership in the field of communications and media.
Dr. Roth lectures on courses in film analysis. Among them are Film Theory, Psychology of TV & Film, Film Directors, Science Fiction TV/Film Genre, Movies from Novels, American Film, Film Appreciation, and British Film. His classes engage students in participation, such as storyboarding (sketching and analyzing shots) and question-and-answer sessions. Dr. Roth has written some lectures in verse to the tunes of pop music. Students then sing his original lyrics with Dr. Roth as he plays the electric guitar. Collected data and anecdotal evidence indicate that these sing-alongs result in superior student learning and long-term retention. In Dr. Roth’s classes, students learn by doing. Dr. Roth was honored by the Regents Merit Award for Teaching.
Dr. Roth is qualified to teach his classes because of his published research. His book on film theory was published in 2014 by the prestigious Routledge Press in London. Film Semiotics, Metz, and Leone’s Trilogy is the first translation and explication of a French film theory, and its first systematic application – using inferential statistics – to comparative film research. His test case is Italian auteur-director Sergio Leone’s first trilogy. Using categories defined by theorist Christian Metz’s Grande Syntagmatique, painstaking content analysis demonstrated that, on a formal level, the style of all three films is truly consistent enough to constitute a valid trilogy. Scholars had hypothesized this idea but never tested it in a systematic way.
Dr. Roth also co-authored “Analyzing Film: An Introduction” [Bedford Press, 2008 and 2011]. His most recent scholarly publication is the co-authored Martian Pictures [McFarland Press, 2018]. In addition, Dr. Roth has published chapters in other academic books about vampire films, Westerns, and Steven Spielberg. His research has been published in refereed, scholarly journals of the humanities, philosophy, English, communication and film. Most of his published work has analyzed science fiction and director John Ford.
Dr. Roth’s biography has been approved on a yearly basis for inclusion in Marquis Who’s Who in America and Marquis Who’s Who in the World, for more than ten years. His biography has also been published in a half-dozen other Who’s Who titles. Dr. Roth’s media experience includes television and radio. In Indiana, he co-hosted a weekly TV program screening classic films. In Florida, he acted in TV commercials. Also, in Florida, he worked as a broadcast engineer for a public radio station where he created, wrote, produced, and performed his own weekly show. He has used his gift as an impressionist to write and perform fundraising promotions for 91.3 KVLU Public Radio in Beaumont, Texas.
In the community, Dr. Roth served as president of the Board of Directors of the Mental Health Association, a United Way agency. The Board consisted of mental health professionals, psychiatrists, psychologists, licensed professional counselors and hospital administrators. They honored Dr. Roth with an award for leadership. Previously, Dr. Roth served on the board and gave guest lectures. Also, in the community, Dr. Roth served as a lector in Holy Masses at St. Anne Catholic Church. Catholic opinion leaders from Dr. Roth’s childhood – Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen and William F. Buckley – continue to influence his Conservative thinking today.
In the Department of Communication, Dr. Roth was a faculty sponsor of the Fine Arts Film Society. He occasionally acted in student films that demonstrate proper pre-production planning, and he acted in a featured role as a “perfectly sane German rocket scientist” in colleague O’Brien Stanley’s years-in-the-making sci-fi movie, “The SS Project.” His additional hobbies consist of writing songs and operating Märklin electric trains in Z-scale. Dr. Roth is more content in Salzburg, because it is more spiritual, sanitary, serene, scenic, safe, and sane.
All during prep school and college, Dr. Roth felt indifferent to grades, studying only what interested him and pursuing those subjects in depth. Not until graduate school did he apply himself assiduously to required courses. Unconcerned about approval or validation from faculty or fellow students, he took classes from other departments. His goal was not “success” or the degree, but continuing expansion of knowledge. Broadening his perspective allowed him to make inferential leaps from one discipline to another. His reluctance to conform to departmental expectations led him to seek out doctoral committee members from other departments: English, philosophy, and modern languages. Consequently, his doctoral committee consisted of seven Professors, so his written and oral exams set records for time duration. “In geistiger Fechterstellung” became his motto.
Dr. Roth continued exploring new areas after earning his PhD. Fascinated with the depth psychology of Dr. Carl Gustav Jung, Dr. Roth studied in workshops and classes at the Jung Center in Houston, and at the Jung-Institut in Küsnacht, Switzerland. Aniela Jaffé, world-renowned analytical [Jungian] psychologist and prolific author, granted him the honor of interviews inside her Zürich flat, 1987. Most of Dr. Roth’s scholarly film research is grounded in Jungian psychology, comparative mythology [Joseph Campbell, etc.], religious history [Mircea Eliade], and cultural anthropology [Victor Turner and others], etc.
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