"'What in heaven’s name brought you to England?'

'My health. I came to England for the waters.'

'Waters-- what waters? We're in the middle of the Midlands.'

'I was misinformed.'"

Professor of History

B.A. Wellesley College

M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D. Yale University

Contact Information

Undergraduate Teaching

• The Formation of American Culture, 1876-1929 (HI282) (not running 2020-21)
• The Formation of American Culture, 1929-2000 (HI2A8) (not running, 2020-21)
• The American West (HI3K8) 
• The Historical Film (HI33Y) (Not running, 2020-21)
• North America: Themes and Problems (AM102)

Postgraduate Teaching

• PhD supervision in film and history, historical fiction, culture industries, women and Hollywood, history, literature, and media of the American West
• Race, Gender, and Hollywood (HI955) (not running 2019)
• History and Film (HI978) (not running 2019)

Selected Publications

Books

• Maisie: The Rise and Fall of Hollywood's Most Powerful Woman (forthcoming).
• I Lost My Girlish Laughter, by Jane Allen, ed. and with introduction (New York: Penguin/Random House, 2019).
• Nobody's Girl Friday: The Women Who Ran Hollywood (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). Theatre Library Association Richard Wall Special Jury Prize; Association of American Publishers PROSE Award for Media and Cultural Studies finalist.
• 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). Association of American Publishers 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

• 'The Outsider,' Cineaste, XLII, no. 4 (fall 2020).
• 'Holiday (1930) and Holiday (1938),' Cineaste, XLV, no. 3 (summer 2020).
• 'Outgrowing Little Women', Cineaste, XLV, no. 2 (spring 2020).
• 'Ida Lupino's America: Just a Big Family of Little Failures', Cineaste, XLV, no. 1 (winter 2019).
• "The Heiress," Cineaste, XLIV, no. 4 (fall 2019): 54-56.
• 'Fighting with My Family', Cineaste, XLIV, no. 3 (summer 2019): 48-49.
• 'Lean on Pete', Cineaste, XLIII, no. 4 (fall 2018): 47-49.
• 'Laura Ziskin's Reboot of the Female Producer', Cineaste, XLIII, no. 3 (summer 2018): 24-30.
• 'The Lion in Winter', Cineaste, XLIII, no. 3 (summer 2018), online exclusive.
• 'Babylon Revisited', Cineaste, XLIII, no. 2 (spring 2018): 4-9.
• 'I, Tonya', Cineaste, XLIII, no. 2 (spring 2018): 42-44.
• 'From Here to Eternity', in Barry Keith Grant, ed., Books to Film: Cinematic Adaptations of Literary Works, Vol. 1 (New York: Cengage, 2018).
• 'Battle of the Sexes', Cineaste, XLIII, no. 1 (winter 2017): 44-46.
• '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, 27: 2 (80) (2012): 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.

The Hollywood Reporter

LA Times

Madam President: Writers Guild Foundation Event March 16

The Organization Woman (British Academy)

Fred Zinnemann and the Cinema of Resistance, Getty Center, April 2012.

Interview with the Los Angeles Times

Smyth Interviews with Tim Zinnemann, Alvin Sargent, Walter Murch, and Maria Cooper

Children of Giant (2015)