My Obituary

Morbid? Perhaps. But I am 60 and much closer to the end than the beginning.

When I first started teaching, I used to give my freshman comp students the assignment to write their own obituaries. It proved quite successful. Now, I have taken on the task myself.
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Dr. David Lavery (1949-2025) prolific literature, film, and television scholar, has passed away at the age of 75. A native of Oil City, Pennsylvania, he graduated from high school there, attended Venango Campus of Clarion State College, and went on to earn a B.S. in English at Clarion’s main campus in 1971.

He abandoned his original plans to teach high school after a terrible experience as a student teacher in a Rocky Grove, PA 7th grade and went on to pursue an M.A. (1973) at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota. From the coldest state in the nation, he then headed south, where he would earn a Ph.D. at the University of Florida, writing his Phi Beta Kappa nominated dissertation on the films of Federico Fellini. In 1979, he married Joyce Kling of Jacksonville, Florida.

With the doctorate in hand and the job market collapsing, he would serve in a succession of one year positions (at the University of North Florida, Seattle University, the University of Alabama in Huntsville) for the next five years. In 1980, he and Joyce became the parents of Rachel Alden Lavery, now a lawyer in New York, and in 1981 would live for a time in Shanghai, People’s Republic of China, where he served as a foreign expert in English at East China Normal University.

In 1983 he finally secured a tenure-track position at Northern Kentucky University outside Cincinnati, where he would remain until 1988. In 1986, their second child, Sarah Caitlin Lavery, now an award-winning journalist and world-famous author, was born in Cincinnati’s Christ Hospital.

Tempted by the opportunity to teach graduate school and offer courses in media studies, he joined the faculty of the Department of Theatre and Communication at Memphis State University. At MSU, Joyce Lavery would earn her M.A. in urban anthropology, and his interest in television studies would burgeon. In 1993, he became Professor of English and Chair (1993-1997) of the department at Middle Tennessee State University, where he would teach for the remainder of his career. From 2006 to 2008, he taught at Brunel University in London.

From 1980 until the time of his death, he would author over two hundred essays in periodicals and chapters in books and author/edit/co-author/co-edit no less than thirty books: Late for the Sky: The Mentality of the Space Age (Southern Illinois U P, 1992); Full of Secrets: Critical Approaches to Twin Peaks (Wayne State U P, 1994); ‘Deny All Knowledge’: Reading The X-Files (Syracuse U P, 1996); Fighting the Forces: What’s at Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Rowman & Littlefield, 2002); Teleparody: Predicting/Preventing the TV Discourse of Tomorrow (Wallflower, Columbia U P, 2002); This Thing of Ours: Investigating The Sopranos (Wallflower, Columbia U P, 2002); Seinfeld, Master of Its Domain: Revisiting Television's Greatest Sitcom (Continuum, 2006); Unlocking the Meaning of Lost: The Unauthorized Guide (Sourcebooks, 2006, 2007); Reading Deadwood: A Western to Swear By (Reading Contemporary Television Series, I. B. Tauris, 2006); Reading The Sopranos: Hit TV from HBO (Reading Contemporary Television Series, I. B. Tauris, 2006); Dear Angela: Remembering My So-Called Life (Lexington Books, 2007); Lost's Buried Treasures (Sourcebooks, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010); Saving the World: A Guide to Heroes (ECW Press, 2007); Finding Battlestar Galactica (Sourcebooks, 2008); The Essential Cult Television Reader (UP of Kentucky, 2010); The Essential Sopranos Reader (UP of Kentucky, 2010); Joss Whedon: Conversations (UP of Mississippi, 2010); On the Verge of Tears: Why the Movies, Television, Music, Art, and Literature Make Us Cry (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010); Screwball Television: Critical Perspectives on Gilmore Girls (Syracuse UP, 2010); Joss: A Creative Portrait of the Maker of the Whedonverses (I. B. Tauris/St. Martin's, 2010); Owen Barfield (Western Esoteric Masters Series, North Atlantic Books, 2010); Television Auteurs (a book and web resource, UP of Mississippi, 2011); Supernatural: TV Goes to Hell (Scarecrow, 2011); TV Finales: Considering the Ends of Television Series (Syracuse UP, 2011), the textbook Television Art (Blackwell Publishing, 2012); Faith in the Distance: Loren Eiseley and the Evolutionary Imagination (U Nebraska P, 2012); Lost: An Oral History (U California P, 2012); the novel Evil Genius: An Experiment in Fantastic Philosophy (Godine, 2013); How to Gut a Book and Other Essays on Poetry, Film, Television, and the Evolution of Consciousness (IUniverse, 2013); The Creative Work of Poets (Harvard UP, 2013); Mimicry: Towards a Biological Poetics (Harvard UP, 2015).

His long-time interest in the Anthroposopher and Inkling Owen Barfield (1898-1997), lead to not only his book on the British thinker but an award-winning film, Owen Barfield: Man Meaning (1994), which he co-authored and co-produced.

During his years at MTSU (1993-2016), he organized international conferences on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Sopranos, and Lost, was a founding co-editor of the journals Slayage: The Journal of the Joss Whedon Society (2001-2011) and Critical Studies in Television and he lectured around the world—Australia, Turkey, the UK, Portugal, New Zealand, Ireland, Germany, Brazil, Japan—on the subject of television and served as a guest/source for the BBC, NPR, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, The New York Times, A Folha de Sao Paulo (Brazil), The Toronto Star, Publica (Portugal) . . . . His long-running blog, the Laverytory, is archived at http://thelaverytory.blogspot.com/.

He is succeeded by his wife Joyce, his daughters Rachel and Sarah, and four grandchildren.