William Solomon

William Solomon is Chair and Professor of English at the University at Buffalo's College of Arts and Sciences since 1996. His research focuses on 20th-century American literature, with emphases on modernism, cultural studies, and the intersections of literature with silent comedy, racial identity, and social critique. Solomon’s work bridges literary analysis with interdisciplinary approaches to film, performance, and political theory.

He has authored monographs such as Slapstick Modernism: Experimental Writing and Silent Comedy, 1909-1969 (in progress) and Second Skins: Black Humor, Racial Identity, and the 1960s (in progress). His scholarship spans modernist aesthetics, Depression-era literature, and the rhetoric of radicalism in American fiction.

His articles explore topics ranging from formalist theory to the ethics of estrangement in Shklovsky and Chaplin, and the politics of slapstick in experimental cinema. Solomon has held editorial roles and contributed to interdisciplinary journals, emphasizing the cultural and ethical dimensions of literary form.