Biography

J. E. Smyth is a historian and film critic.

B.A. Wellesley College, 1999; M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D. Yale University, 2000-2005.

 

Contact Information

Undergraduate Teaching

• The Formation of American Culture, 1876-1929 (HI282) 
• The Formation of American Culture, 1929-2000 (HI2A8) 
• The American West (HI3K8)
• The Historical Film (HI33Y) 
• The Invention of the American Indian (HI2G9)

Postgraduate Teaching

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

Books

• Mary C. McCall Jr.: The Rise and Fall of Hollywood's Most Powerful Screenwriter (New York: Columbia University Press, 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.

Selected recent articles, reviews and video essays since 2017

• 'All smirk and no play', Times Literary Supplement (4 October 2024).
• 'The frog and the princess', Times Literary Supplement (28 June 2024).
• 'Authors and auteurs', Times Literary Supplement (19 January 2024).
• 'Ice-cold femme fatale', Times Literary Supplement (12 January 2024).
• 'Lost Lady/The Lady Vanishes: A Historian's Whodunnit', Cineaste (summer 2023), 34-39.
• 'Im Westen Nichts Neues', Cineaste (spring 2023), 51-53.
• 'The Unmaking of the English Working-Class Actor', Cineaste (fall 2022), 4-9.
• 'The Avenging Goddess of Screenwriters', Los Angeles Review of Books (18 November 2022).
• 'L'Evenement', Cineaste (fall 2022), 43-45.
• 'The Heresy of Truth: An Interview with Paul Verhoeven', Cineaste (winter 2021), 34-7.
• 'Benedetta', Сineaste (winter 2021), 42-43.
• 'The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of: The Dark History Behind The Maltese Falcon', Cineaste (fall 2021), 4-9.
• 'Gunda', Cineaste (fall 2021), 44-46.
• 'Barbara McLean', for The Gunfighter, The Criterion Collection (2020).
• 'Harriet Parsons', American National Biography (2020).
• 'Outgrowing Little Women', Cineaste (spring 2020), 8-13.
• 'Ida Lupino's America: Just a Big Family of Little Failures', Cineaste (winter 2020), 12-15, 78.
• 'The Heiress', Cineaste (fall 2019), 54-56.
• 'Kay Brown', American National Biography (2019).
• 'Mary C. McCall Jr.', American National Biography (2018).
• 'Babylon Revisited', Cineaste (spring 2018), 4-9.
• 'The Anatomy of the Prick Flick', Cineaste (fall 2017), 20-24.
• 'The First Woman President of the Screen Writers Guild', Written By (September-October 2017), 38-42, 63.
• 'Marsha Hunt: American Girl, Un-American Woman', Sight & Sound (17 October 2017).
• 'Barbara McLean: Editing, Authorship and the Equal Right to Be the Best', Cineaste (spring 2017), 20-23.
• 'When a Woman Called the Shots at the Screen Writers Guild', womenandhollywood.com (14 March 2017).

"'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.'"

News and Press

La Revue de la Cite interview

Jacobin praise for Mary C. McCall Jr.

Publishers WeeklyLink opens in a new window praise for Mary C. McCall Jr: The Rise and Fall of Hollywood's Most Powerful Screenwriter

'The Avenging Goddess of Screenwriters', Los Angeles Review of Books

2021 Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences film scholar
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The Hollywood Reporter

LA Times

Americana InterviewLink opens in a new window

Madam President: Writers Guild Foundation Event March 16

The Organization Woman (British Academy)

Children of Giant (2015)

Fred Zinnemann and the Cinema of Resistance