Professor J. E. Smyth

Biography

J. E. Smyth is a historian and critic.

Professor, Department of History, University of Warwick (2016- ).

Reader, Department of History, University of Warwick (2014-2016).

Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Warwick (2011-2014).

Assistant Professor, Department of History, University of Warwick (2005-2011).

Ph.D., Departments of Film Studies and American Studies, Yale University (2005).

M.Phil., Department of American Studies, Yale University (2002).

M.A., Department of the History of Art, Yale University (2000).

B.A., Wellesley College (1999), summa cum laude.

Contact Information

Faculty of Arts Building 3.41

Office hours 2026-27: Tuesdays 1-2pm; Fridays 12-1pm

personal website: https://nobodysgirlfriday.com

for press and other media enquiries, see https://jesmyth.co.uk/get-in-touch/

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

Books

Mary C. McCall Jr.: The Rise and Fall of Hollywood's Most Powerful Screenwriter (Columbia University Press, 2024). Theatre Library Association Richard Wall Memorial Award finalist.
I Lost My Girlish Laughter, by Jane Allen, ed. and with introduction (Penguin/Random House, 2019).
Nobody's Girl Friday: The Women Who Ran Hollywood (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 (British Film Institute/Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
Fred Zinnemann and the Cinema of Resistance (University Press of Mississippi, 2014). Theatre Library Association Richard Wall Memorial Award finalist.
Hollywood and the American Historical Film, ed. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
Edna Ferber's Hollywood: American Fictions of Gender, Race, and History, preface by Thomas Schatz (University of Texas Press, 2009). Association of American Publishers PROSE Award for Media and Cultural Studies.
Reconstructing American Historical Cinema from Cimarron to Citizen KaneLink opens in a new window (University Press of Kentucky, 2006). 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

'Theatres of feminism and cinema's vanished ladies: Dame May Whitty and Margaret Lockwood beyond the narrow gaze of Hitchcock Studies', Screen 67:3 (autumn 2026).
'A little drop of the cheese: women film-makers in Hollywood', Times Literary Supplement (July 24, 2026).
'Who controls the past: the BBC is restricting access to its archives', Times Literary Supplement (November 14, 2025).
'Dream factory outsiders: British women who defied Hollywood stereotyping', Times Literary Supplement (August 1, 2025).
' "No Manners at all and always seeing things': The return of Hitchcock's vanished Englishwomen in The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes'. In Re-viewing Hitchcock, ed. Robert Kapsis (London: Bloomsbury, 2025).
'Stand by your man', Times Literary Supplement (July 10, 2025). [review of Grace Pervades, Theatre Royal, Bath]
'Self-Interview', Times Literary Supplement (June 5, 2025).
'Women of the west: a feminist approach to High Noon', for High Noon, Eureka Entertainment (2025).
'The Revolutionary Mr Scofield in the global theatres of the Cold War'Link opens in a new window, Modern Language Review, 120: 1 (Jan. 2025): 17-37.
'Sherlock's home'Link opens in a new window, Times Literary Supplement (25 October 2024).
'All smirk and no play', Times Literary Supplement (4 October 2024).
'The frog and the princess: Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor's volatile partnership', 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 (autumn 2022), 4-9.
'The avenging goddess of screenwriters', Los Angeles Review of Books (18 November 2022).
'L'Evenement', Cineaste (autumn 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 (autumn 2021), 4-9.
'Gunda', Cineaste (autumn 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 (autumn 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 (autumn 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).