Professor J. E. Smyth

"In this rat-race everybody's guilty till they're proved innocent."-- Margo Channing

Professor of History

B.A. Wellesley College

Ph.D. Yale University

Contact Information

website: https://jesmyth.co.uk

Office: H328

2018-19 office hours: Tuesday 12-1; Th: 11-12 or

by appointment; term 2 week 7 office hours Tuesday 12-1 and Thursday 11-12

Telephone: 02476 523457

email: j.e.smyth@warwick.ac.uk

Undergraduate Teaching

Postgraduate Teaching

Race, Gender, and Hollywood (HI955) (not running this year)
History and Film (HI978) (not running this year)

Selected Publications

Books

Nobody's Girl Friday: The Women Who Ran Hollywood (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).
From Here to Eternity (London: British Film Institute/Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
Fred Zinnemann and the Cinema of Resistance (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014). Theatre Library Association Richard Wall Memorial Award finalist.
Hollywood and the American Historical Film, ed. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
Edna Ferber's Hollywood: American Fictions of Gender, Race, and History, preface by Thomas Schatz (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009). AAP PROSE Award for Media and Cultural Studies.
Reconstructing American Historical Cinema From 'Cimarron' to 'Citizen Kane' (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006; 2009). International Association of Media Historians' Prize in Media and History; Theatre Library Association Richard Wall Memorial Award finalist.

Articles

'Lean on Pete', Cineaste, XLIII, no. 4 (fall 2018).
'Laura Ziskin's Reboot of the Female Producer', Cineaste, XLIII, no. 3 (summer 2018).
'The Lion in Winter', Cineaste, XLIII, no. 3 (summer 2018).
'Babylon Revisited', Cineaste, XLIII, no. 2 (spring 2018).
'I, Tonya', Cineaste, XLIII, no. 2 (spring 2018).
'Battle of the Sexes', Cineaste, XLIII, no. 1 (winter 2017).
'Anatomy of the Prick Flick'. Cineaste: 50th Anniversary Issue XLII, no. 4 (fall 2017): 20-24.
'Marsha Hunt: American Girl, Un-American Woman, Upstanding Centenarian', Sight and Sound (October 2017).
'The McCall Years: When a Woman Called the Shots at the Screen Writers Guild', Written By (September 2017).
'The First Woman President', Written By: The Magazine of the Writers Guild of America West (June 2017).
'Barbara McLean: Editing, Authorship, and the Equal Right to Be the Best', Cineaste XLII, no. 2 (spring 2017).
'High Noon', Cineaste XLII, no. 1 (winter 2016): 54-55.
'Brief Encounter', Cineaste XLI, no. 4 (fall 2016): 53-54.
'Female Editors in Studio-Era Hollywood: Rethinking Feminist “Frontiers” and the Constraints of the Archives', in Patrice Petro, E. Ann Kaplan, Kristin Hole, and Dijana Jelaca, eds., The Routledge Companion to Cinema and Gender, 279-88 (London: Routledge, 2016).
'Organization Women and Belle Rebels: Hollywood's Working Women in the 1930s', in Iwan Morgan, ed. Hollywood and the Great Depression, 66-85 (Edinburgh University Press, 2016).
'A Woman at the Center of Hollywood's Wars: Mary C. McCall, Jr.', Cineaste XLI, no. 3 (summer 2016): 18-23.
'45 Years', Cineaste XLI, no. 3 (summer 2016): 46-47.
'Children of Lidice: Searches, Shadows, Histories', in Monica Tempian and Simone Gigliotti, eds., Young Victims of the Nazi Regime: Migration, the Holocaust, and Postwar Displacement, 299-320 (London: Bloomsbury, 2016).
'The Past, Present, and Future of Women's History on Screen: An Interview with Sarah Gavron', Cineaste XLI, no. 1 (winter 2015): 18-21.
'Suffragette', Cineaste XLI, no. 1 (winter 2015): 45-46.
'Hollywood as Historian, 1929-45', in Cynthia Lucia, Roy Grundmann, and Arthur Simon (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to American Film History: Selected Readings, Origins to 1960, 361-76 (Boston: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015).
'Hollywood Under Siege', Canadian Journal of History/Annales canadiennes d'histoire 49:3 (2014) 477-82.
'The Western That Got Its Content ‘From Elsewhere’: High Noon, Fred Zinnemann, and Genre Cleansing', The Quarterly Review of Film and Video 31 (2014): 42-55.
'Against the Beat: Ragtime, Black History, and Postmodernism', Film Quarterly 67:1 (December 2013): 7-13.
'Julia’s Resistant History: Women’s Historical Films in Hollywood and the Legacy of Citizen Kane', in Robert Rosenstone and Constantin Parvelescu (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to the Historical Film, 91-109 (Boston: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).
'The Organization Woman Behind The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit', Camera Obscura (2012) 27(2 80): 61-91.
'Julia (1977) and "The Long Road of Women's Memory"', in Smyth, ed. (2012).
'Fred Zinnemann's Search: Reconstructing the Voices of Europe's Children', Film History 23:1 (2011): 75-92.
'Hollywood as Historian, 1929-1945', in Cynthia Lucia, Roy Grundmann, and Arthur Simon (eds.), The Wiley-Blackwell History of American Film, vol. 2 of 4, (Boston: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011).
'James Jones, Columbia Pictures, and the Historical Confrontations of From Here to Eternity', in Peter Rollins and John E. O'Connor (eds)., Why We Fought: America's Wars in Film and History, 283-302 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008).
'Classical Hollywood and the Filmic Writing of Interracial History, 1931-1939', in Mary Beltran and Camilla Fojas (eds.), Mixed Race Hollywood , 23-46 (New York: New York University Press, 2008).
'Jim Crow, Jett Rink, and James Dean: Reconstructing Edna Ferber's Giant', American Studies 48:3 (fall 2007): 5-27.
'American History and Classical Hollywood', Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society IX,1 (September/October 2007): 23-5.
'New Frontiers in American Interracial History: Edna Ferber and the Indian Mixed-Blood', in The European Journal of Native American Studies 20:1 (2006): 39-45.
'Hollywood "Takes One More Look": Early Histories of Hollywood and the Fallen Star Biography, 1932-1937', The Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 26:2 (June 2006): 179-201.
‘Competing Frontiers: RKO and the Challenge of Cimarron’, in Peter Rollins and John E. O’Connor (eds.), Hollywood’s West (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2005): 37-64.
‘The Three Ages of Imperial Cinema from the Death of Gordon to The Return of the King’, in Janet Croft (ed.), Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings (Altadena, CA: Mythopoeic Press, 2004): 3-23.
‘Revisioning Modern American History in the Age of Scarface (1932)’, The Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 24:4 (2004): 535-563. Carfax-International Association of Media Historians' Award, best article, 2004.
‘Young Mr. Lincoln: Between Myth and History in 1939’, Rethinking History 7:2 (2003): 193-214.
‘The New Western History in 1931’, Film and History 33:1 (2003): 9-17.