About

Phillip Zapkin is an Assistant Teaching Professor of English at Penn State, having joined the faculty in 2017. He teaches introductory rhetoric and composition, as well as business writing and social sciences writing. His educational background includes a PhD in English from West Virginia University, obtained in 2017, an MA in English from the University of Vermont in 2011, and a BA in English from Shepherd University in 2009. Zapkin has experience teaching composition and literature at both the Master's and Doctoral levels. As a scholar, Phillip Zapkin primarily focuses on contemporary Anglophone drama, with a particular interest in adaptations of Greek drama and myth. His first book, 'Hellenic Common: Greek Drama and Cultural Cosmopolitanism in the Neoliberal Era,' explores how adaptations of Greek tragedy challenge neoliberal capitalism by emphasizing the global cultural commonwealth of Greek drama. His scholarly essays have been published in various academic journals including PMLA, Modern Drama, Comparative Drama, and The South Atlantic Review. In addition to his research, Zapkin has led study abroad programs in London, focusing on themes such as Crime and Justice and Staging London, involving visits to notable theaters and historical sites.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Art
• History
• Literature
• Humanities

Selected publications

• Antipodean Theseus: The Narrative Influence of Classical Myth on the Historiography of William Larnach

  Histories · 2026-02-10

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  This essay examines six depictions of the 1898 suicide of New Zealand businessman and politician William Larnach: four historical narratives and two dramatic/fictional depictions. Drawing on the insights of postmodern historiographers like Hayden White, I argue that these tellings reflect an increasing influence of the Hippolytus myth, a culturally authorized narrative rooted in traditional British colonial education structures and Antipodean reception of classics. In particular, as New Zealand shifted away from British identification to a distinctly Kiwi identity, classics legitimized New Zealand culture within a global north from which the Antipodean nation is geographically isolated. Analyzing depictions of Larnach’s death and the possible incestuous scandal leading up to it reveals important historiographic insights both into how history is conceptualized and emplotted and into how Antipodean cultures navigate their positions on the fringes of a larger global north primarily seated in Europe and North America.

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• Analytical Engine: Computers, Prophecy, and the Paradox of Fate in Walid Ikhlasi’s <i>Oedipus</i>

  Theatre and Performance Notes and Counternotes · 2024-08-01

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  Abstract This article analyzes concerns about how much control computers have over our lives, which is at the heart of Syrian dramatist Walid Ikhlasi’s 1978 play Oedipus, a modernized adaptation from Sophocles. Ikhlasi’s play poses crucial questions about humanity’s interactions with computers, particularly questions about control and (in)dependence in a digital age. Ikhlasi’s Oedipus-figure transforms from a techno-skeptic to believing that technology is some kind of all-powerful force threatening to overwrite human destiny because computers have so much more access to information than any individual human. These fears, and the play’s thematic implications for society, are detailed in this article.

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• Die Politik von Caligari: Totalitarian Anxieties in Adaptations of Robert Weine’s Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari

  Humanities · 2024-09-16

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  Contemporary politics is filled with anxiety about the survival of democracy—particularly within a framework pitting liberal representative democracy against authoritarianism. In times of anxiety about authoritarianism, Western artists repeatedly return to a masterpiece of relatively early cinema: Robert Weine’s silent film Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, or The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. This essay examines three twenty-first century adaptations: David Lee Fisher’s 2005 remake of the film; James Morrow’s 2017 novel, The Asylum of Dr. Caligari; and Georgie Bailey’s 2022 play Caligari. I argue that while the direct politico-cultural anxieties of Weine’s film have often been overstated, the emergence of adaptations during periods of heightened concern about authoritarianism reflects a deep-seated reception of the film as anticipating autocratic governance. However, for all its fears about power, control, and the loss of self-determination, Weine’s movie also contains the seeds of liberation. Cesare ultimately sacrifices his own life rather than murdering Jane. And it is this gesture that the adaptations examined here seek—a gesture of resistance. The sleepwalker can awaken and assert a form of just resistance in the world, even if the penalties are steep.

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• Classicising Crisis: The Modern Age of Revolutions and the Greco-Roman Empire ed. by Barbara Goff and Michael Simpson

  The Classical Journal · 2023-02-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Reviewed by: Classicising Crisis: The Modern Age of Revolutions and the Greco-Roman Empire ed. by Barbara Goff and Michael Simpson Phillip Zapkin Classicising Crisis: The Modern Age of Revolutions and the Greco-Roman Empire. Edited by Barbara Goff and Michael Simpson. London, UK: Routledge, 2021. Pp. 240. Hardback, $128.00; e-book, $39.16. ISBN: 9780815361770. In the Introduction to Classicising Crisis, Barbara Goff and Michael Simpson acknowledge that the two concepts of classics and crisis may, at first blush, seem contradictory (1-2). Both classics as a discipline and classical literature are often stereotyped as tweedy, old-fashioned, elitist or conservative; by contrast, crisis contains both the threat of danger and the potential of revolutionary idealism. However, this ostensible opposition is belied by the regularity with which [End Page 373] revolutionaries, social reformers and utopian dreamers turn to the Greco-Roman tradition for inspiration and to make sense of crises as historical inflection points. The essays in this collection chart these tensions, tracing competing traditions of classics being deployed simultaneously to support revolutionary goals and the status quo in opposition to even gradual reform. This tension is at the heart of Classicising Crisis, shaping the reception of classics in virtually every essay. Right from Goff and Simpson's Introduction, which explicitly explores the tensions between the titular terms, the multiple uses to which Greco-Roman antiquity can be put is apparent. Goff and Simpson frame the collection in terms of competing questions: about whether revolutionaries are inspired by classical texts or merely try to fit revolutionary sentiments into classical molds; about whether the rhetorical deployment of classics is done in good faith or merely to generate sympathy and cultural capital; about how and why revolutionary movements are classicized; and about whether the classical framework allows revolutions to imagine brave new worlds or whether liberatory movements are constrained by these models (2). The remainder of the Introduction provides brief surveys of revolutionary theory going back to Plato and Aristotle's political writings, with a big focus on Karl Marx and Hannah Arendt, then a survey of the impact of classical reception on the modern world, particularly during the period of revolutions from the mid-16th century through the present. Goff and Simpson's questions frame the collection as a whole, with each of the essays attempting to work through the tensions. Structurally, Classicising Crisis moves chronologically through various revolutionary crises, beginning with the English Civil War and ending with the contemporary global economic crisis following the 2008 Great Recession. Rachel Foxley's opening essay examines early 16th-century English discourse around "innovation" as rooted in classical political philosophy, particularly Aristotle's Politics. The charge of "innovation" was used to condemn religious and political reformists and simultaneously to critique the monarchy and Anglican church. In the first of three essays on late 18th-century revolutions, Nicholas Cole argues that although the leaders of the American Revolution continually quoted Greco-Roman sources, it was not until the framing of the US Constitution that American politicians and intellectuals seriously began grappling with the political problems of antiquity. Sebastian Robins then looks at the political discourse of 1790s Britain to show how [End Page 374] conservatives deployed classical political philosophy to counteract its use by radical thinkers of the American and French Revolutions. Following this, Adam Lecznar links the psychological blurring of (neo)classical statues and living people with the political tensions of the Haitian Revolution, as depicted in Alejo Carpentier's novel The Kingdom of this World. Moving into the 19th century, Katerina Kitsi-Mitakou and Vasiliki Misiou argue that feminist authors in the new Hellenic Republic blended virtuous heroines from ancient Greek myth with Christian values to imagine a new, socially empowered role for women in the deeply patriarchal society of 19th-century Greece. Isobel Hurst then examines Anglophone expat writers' reactions to the Italian Risorgimento of 1848-1849, showing how Roman referents sometimes built support for the republicans and sometimes prompted detachment or even disenchantment with contemporary Italians. Challenging the usual narrative that the Russian Revolution of 1917 marked a clean break that destroyed Russian studies of the classics, Henry Stead...

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• Medusa’s choice

  Science Fiction Film & Television · 2023-10-08

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  Ovid’s _Metamorphoses_ gave Medusa little agency, which has prompted numerous feminist reclamations of the gorgon. The tension around agency shapes Matthew B.C.’s feminist horror movie _Medusa_ (2021), in which Carly Beacon transforms into a serpent-like creature after being bitten by a snake. Evoking simultaneously the gender-ambiguous figures of monster and final girl, Carly acquires increased power and autonomy as she kills her pimp and violent johns. However, her agency is undercut by both a lack of choice about being bitten and a failure to resolve the cultural conditions driving prostitution and drug addiction. _Medusa_ troubles Carly’s empowerment by reinforcing her lack of choice and ignoring the failure to change larger socio-cultural conditions – raising questions about what genuine feminist liberation might mean.

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• De-Colonizing Cloudcuckooland

  2023-02-06

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Yvette Nolan’s 2013 play, The Birds, adapts Aristophanes’ comedy into an anti-colonial and pro-democracy fable advocating First Nations peoples’ self-determination. Aristophanes suggests democracy drags down aristocratic virtues, but communal decision making is central to Nolan’s Birds’ governance. Nolan proffers this form of consensus-based direct democracy as a return to Indigenous traditions of self-government. Athenian direct democracy is vastly different from contemporary representative democracy, but Nolan’s play enacts a third democratic tradition. Nolan’s adaptation performs Indigenous resurgence, valorizing First Nations’ values. Unlike Aristophanes’ play, where Pisthetareus successfully builds his Bird city-state, Nolan’s Birds reassert their own culture. Eagle reminds the Birds that they rejected the ideology of ownership that allows some to exploit others. Eagle says, “We chose to begin again / Remembering what we know in our hearts / What, between us all, we can remember / Moving forward in a good way // The land cannot be owned / The walls must come down.” This reminds the Birds of their communal values and the ethical importance of living in harmony.

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• The Winter Garden: Sarah Ruhl's In the Next Room and the Dialectic Deconstruction of Separate Spheres

  Journal of dramatic theory and criticism · 2022-03-01

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  Sarah Ruhl's In the Next Room (2009) breaks down the nineteenth-century dichotomy of public and private spheres. Catherine Givings exists in her parlor, which is separated from her husband's operating theatre where he treats hysteria patients by inducing orgasms with electric vibrators. Following much feminist dramatic precedent, Catherine is trapped in the domestic sphere, unable to make meaningful relationships. The private space of the parlor and the public (in its association with medical science) operating theatre interpenetrate one another, compromising the ideology of nineteenth-century gendered spaces. However, only when Catherine and Dr. Givings are transported to the winter garden—a third space outside the normal bounds of the public/private binary—can they connect emotionally. Ruhl's play models this alternative space of human connection to advocate breaking down of contemporary gendered binaries and hierarchies.

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• Petrifyin’: Canonical Counter-Discourse in Two Caribbean Women’s Medusa Poems

  Humanities · 2022-02-07 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This essay utilizes Helen Tiffin’s idea of canonical counter-discourse to read the Medusa poems of Shara McCallum and Dorothea Smartt, two female Caribbean poets. Essentially, canonical counter-discourse involves authors rewriting works or giving voice to peripheral/silenced characters from the literary canon to challenge inequalities upheld by power structures such as imperialism and patriarchy. McCallum’s and Smartt’s poems represent Medusa to reflect their own concerns as women of color from Jamaica and Barbados, respectively. McCallum’s “Madwoman as Rasta Medusa” aligns the titular character from her book Madwoman with Medusa to express Madwoman’s righteous anger at the “wanton” and “gravalicious” ways of a Babylon addressed in second person. Smartt’s series of Medusa poems from Connecting Medium explore the pain of hair and skin treatments Black women endure to try and meet Euro-centric beauty standards, as well as the struggles of immigrants, particularly people of color. Both poets claim Medusa as kindred, empowering Medusa as a figure with agency—which she is denied in the Greco-Roman sources—and simultaneously legitimizing both Caribbean literature and the poets’ feminist and post-colonial protests by linking them to the cultural capital of the classics.

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• War as Performance: Conflicts in Iraq and Political Theatricality by Lindsey Mantoan

  Journal of dramatic theory and criticism · 2021-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
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• Korinthiazomai

  2021-06-22

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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Frequent coauthors

• Yvonne Hammond

  16 shared

• Sandy Baldwin

  16 shared

• Katie Hubbard

  16 shared

• Gabriel Tremblay‐Gaudette

  16 shared

• Kwabena Opoku-Agyemang

  16 shared

Education

• PhD, Department of English

  West Virginia University

  2017

• MA, Department of English

  University of Vermont

  2011

• BA, English and Modern Languages

  Shepherd University

  2009