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Professor J E Smyth

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
Faculty of Arts Building 3.41
Office hours beginning term 1: Tuesday 12--1pm (Teams) and Friday 12-1pm (office)
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for press and other media enquiries, see https://jesmyth.co.uk/get-in-touch/
Books
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).
Undergraduate Teaching
Postgraduate Teaching
  • PhD supervision in film and media, 19th and 20th-century US literature, cultural history and historiography

"'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.'"