Meet Dr. Miles Doleac. He has been a professor at Southern Mississippi for three years, and has recently turned into a writer, director, and actor of an upcoming film called The Historian.
Dr. Doleac’s story begins in college, where he received a BFA in Drama from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. He then received an MA and PhD in History from The University of Southern Mississippi and Tulane University in New Orleans, respectively. He is currently teaching Latin language courses at all levels, as well as numerous History courses focusing on the Greco-Roman World.
The Historian was a convergence of two meaningful paths of Dr. Doleac’s life: the love of history and the love of the theater. Inspired by some of his positive and negative experiences in the academic world, The Historian’s first draft was written in three weeks’ time a little more than a year ago, where it was then shipped to Mackenzie Westmoreland, a personal friend in the theater business in New York. With Westmoreland’s help, Dr. Doleac hired a casting director and began reaching for actors. Roughly a year later, The Historian was being filmed.
The Historian was also a way for Dr. Doleac to shed some light on a matter he takes very seriously. He has noticed a trend in academia of shifting funding away from the Humanities Department and towards other areas that will, supposedly, bring more money into the universities. He says, “Language is the life-blood of culture, the sine qua non. The very fundamentals of communication begin to falter, and that’s led to a fair number of problems in our country, in my view.”
Dr. Doleac trusts that the audience will open their eyes to the issue at hand, while at the same time enjoying a film. He wants them to think and laugh and possibly have an altered or enhanced worldview. He also hopes that the audience will leave the theater thinking, “Can’t wait to see what that guy directs next.”