Professor J. E. Smyth

J. E. Smyth is a historian and film critic

B.A. Wellesley College, 1999

M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D. Yale University, 2000-2005

PhD supervision in film and media, 19th and 20th-century US literature, cultural history and historiography

Mary C. McCall Jr.: The Rise and Fall of Hollywood's Most Powerful Screenwriter (forthcoming, 2024).
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.

"'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.'"