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Maurice Yacowar (25 March 1942- ) is a Canadian writer and academic. He was born in Prelate, Saskatchewan, the son of Sam and Sophie Yacowar. The family moved to Calgary in 1950. He now lives in Victoria, BC.

Education and Career At 16 Yacowar he began a three-year part-time stint as cub reporter for the controversial Roy Farran on the North Hill News, an experience he would later re-examine in a memoir, Roy and Me: This Is Not A Memoir (Athabasca University Press, 2010).

Yacowar attended the University of Alberta, Calgary, beginning when the campus was part of the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology. When the university moved to its new campus in 1960 Yacowar was founding editor of the weekly student newspaper The Gauntlet. The Remembrance Day edition contained a controversial editorial attacking the institution for glamorizing war and soldiers. He would later describe that piece as “an exercise in belligerent pacifism.” A few months later he was fired from the editorship for publishing the school’s first literary issue, which contained a suggestive line in a short story written by another student. That spring Yacowar was elected campus representative for the National Federation of Canadian University Students. The following year the students elected him president of the Students Union.

Yacowar received his MA (English) from the University of Alberta in 1965, while teaching at Lethbridge Junior College, with a thesis on "The Earl of Rochester's Recastings of Other Writers.” He proceeded to The University of Birmingham (UK), where in 1968 he received his doctorate from the Shakespeare Institute, with a dissertation titled John Lyly and the Uses of Irony. In 1968 Yacowar returned to Canada for a teaching and administrative career that began at Brock University, where he started the film and popular culture program. He was appointed Full Professor in 1978, chaired the Drama and Film Department, then served two terms as Dean of Humanities. He went on to serve as Academic Dean at Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, Vancouver (1989-95), and Dean of Fine Arts at the University of Calgary (1995-2001), where he retired as Professor Emeritus in 2007. Yacowar enjoyed taking his film studies outside the academy. He wrote three film and TV columns per week for the St Catharines Standard (1973-89) and did film reviews and interviews on the CBC FM radio program Stereo Morning (1979-85). He hosted several film programs on TV Ontario and offered a credit course in film analysis for the BC Open University. He sat on the Ontario Film Review Board (1986-9) and the Board of the Niagara Artists Centre (1980-7).

An avid collector of Inuit art and international graphics, he curated three Inuit exhibitions in St Catharines, Ontario, and Calgary, Alberta, one in Vancouver, B.C., and one at a Hampstead gallery in London, England. He has made significant contributions to the collections at the Universities of Calgary, Victoria and Alberta and the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria.

Awards:


 * 1961- The R.L. King Memorial Scholarship in Journalism
 * 1965 - the Dorothy Burritt Film Study Award
 * 1967 Canada Council Doctoral Fellowships
 * 1975 Canada Council Research Fellowship
 * 1987 University of Calgary Alumnus of the Year Award.

Bibliography: No Use Shutting the Door, Fiddlehead Poetry Books, 1971 Hitchcock's British Films, Shoestring Press, 1977. Republished by Wayne State UP, 2010 Tennessee Williams and Film, Frederick Ungar, 1977 I Found It At The Movies, Revisionist Press, 1978 Loser Take All: The Comic Art of Woody Allen, Frederick Ungar, 1979. Expanded edition, Continuum Press, 1991 Method in Madness, St. Martin's Press, 1981. Expanded edition W.H.Allen, London, The Comic Art of Mel Brooks, 1982; expanded edition, Crescent Moon, 2015 Studies in International Cinema, B.C. Open University telecourse, 1992 The Films of Paul Morrissey, Cambridge University Press, Fall, 1993. Spanish edition, 1999 The Bold Testament, Bayeux Arts, 1999 The Sopranos on the Couch: Analyzing TV’s Greatest Series (Continuum, 2002; expanded editions, 2003, 2005; 2006 The Sopranos Season Seven. Lulu, 2007 The Great Bratby. Middlesex University Press, London, 2008 Mondays with Moishe, Lulu, 2009 Reading Shtisel: A TV Masterpiece from Israel, Lulu, 2019. Yacowar provided the critical commentary for the Criterion laser disc editions of the films Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel), 1987; Blood for Dracula (Paul Morrissey), 1996 (DVD 1998); and Flesh for Frankenstein (Paul Morrissey), 1996 (DVD 1998).

His occasional analysis of current films can be found at yacowar.blogspot.com. .