John Whitehead is Associate Professor and Director of Fine Arts with a focus on film studies, contemporary literature, and creative writing. His monograph, Appraising The Graduate: The Mike Nichols Classic and Its Impact in Hollywood, was published by McFarland in 2011.

A native of Philadelphia, he did his graduate work at Temple University, and wrote a creative thesis from which several short stories were subsequently published, including "The Sins of the Father," which won the 1987 Best Fiction award from The Other Side. He has subsequently published 20 short stories, more than a dozen of them in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. He has written regularly on books and culture for scholarly journals such as Christianity and Literature and The Christian Scholar's Review and for major newspapers in California, West Virginia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

He has been at WJU since 1990, but rarely for more than a month or two at a time; recent study trips have taken him to the American Southwest, subject of a book he is researching (on cinema masterpieces in the National Parks), which he will begin writing after completing his next book, The Films of Mike Nichols, under contract to McFarland for release in 2013.