Books, essays, and reviews

Mary C. McCall Jr.: The Rise and Fall of Hollywood’s Most Powerful Screenwriter (New York: Columbia University Press, 2024).

Jane Allen, I Lost My Girlish Laughter, ed. and with new introduction by JS (New York: Random House/Vintage, 2019).

Nobody’s Girl Friday: The Women Who Ran Hollywood (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). Richard Wall Award Special Jury Prize, Theatre Library Association.

From Here to Eternity (London: British Film Institute/Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

Fred Zinnemann and the Cinema of Resistance (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014). Finalist, Richard Wall Award, Theatre Library Association.

Hollywood and the American Historical Film, ed. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

With essays by film scholars working in a range of disciplines, including David Culbert, Susan Courtney, David Eldridge, Robert Sklar, Vera Dika, and Robert Rosenstone.

Edna Ferber’s Hollywood: American Fictions of Gender, Race, and History, preface by Thomas Schatz (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009). PROSE Award, 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; finalist, Richard Wall Award, Theatre Library Association.

Recent Reviews

“Stand By Your Man.” Times Literary Supplement, July 11, 2025.

“‘No Manners at All and Always Seeing Things’: The Return of Hitchcock’s Vanished Englishwomen in The 39 Steps (1935) and The Lady Vanishes (1938).” In Robert Kapsis (ed.), Re-Viewing Hitchcock (London: Bloomsbury, 2025).

“Self-Interview.” Times Literary Supplement, June 6, 2025.

“The Revolutionary Mr Scofield in the Global Theatres of the Cold War,” Modern Language Review, 120: 1 (January 2025): 17-37.

“Sherlock’s Home.” Times Literary Supplement, October 25, 2024.

“All Smirk and No Play.” Times Literary Supplement, October 4, 2024.

“The Frog and the Princess.” Times Literary Supplement, 28 June 2024: 26.

“Authors and Auteurs.” The Times Literary Supplement, 19 January 2024.

“Ice-Cold Femme Fatale.” The Times Literary Supplement, 12 January 2024.

“Lost Lady/The Lady Vanishes: A Historian’s Whodunnit.” Cineaste vol. XLVIII, no. 3 (summer 2023): 34-9.

“The Lost King.” Cineaste vol. XLVIII, no. 3 (summer 2023): 45-47.

“All Quiet on the Western Front/Im Westen Nichts Neues.” Cineaste vol. XLVIII, no. 2 (spring 2023): 51-53.

“The Avenging Goddess of Screenwriters.” Los Angeles Review of Books. 18 November 2022.

“The Unmaking of the English Working-Class Actor.” Cineaste vol. XLVII, no. 4(fall 2022): 4-9.

“Happening (2021),” Cineaste (fall).

“Strawberry Mansion.” Cineaste vol. XLVII, no. 3 (summer 2022): 53-54.

“High Sierra.” Cineaste vol. XLVII, no. 2 (spring 2022): 64-66.

“Arsenic and Old Lace.” Cineaste vol. XLVIII, no. 2 (spring 2022): 60-62.

“Summertime.” Cineaste vol. XLVIII, no. 1 (winter 2022): 57-58.

“The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of: The Dark History Behind The Maltese Falcon.” Cineaste vol. XLVI, no. 4 (fall): 4-9.

“Playing Her Script Their Way: Another Look at Mae West.” Cineaste vol. XLVII, no. 1 (winter 2021): 30-3.

“The Heresy of Truth: An Interview with Paul Verhoeven.” Cineaste vol. XLVII, no. 1 (winter 2021): 34-7.

“Benedetta.” Cineaste vol. XLVII, no. 1 (winter 2021): 42-43.

“Gunda.” Cineaste vol. XLVI, no. 4 (fall 2021): 44-46.

“Clockwise.” Cineaste vol. XLVI, no. 2 (summer 2021): 60-62.

“Outgrowing Little Women,” Cineaste (spring 2020).

“Holiday.” Cineaste vol. XLV, no. 2 (summer 2020): 64-66.

“The Outsider: The Wisdom and Regrets of Screenwriter Alvin Sargent.” Cineaste vol. XLV, no. 4 (fall 2020): 16-20.

“Ida Lupino’s America: Just a Big Family of Little Failures,” Cineaste (winter 2019).

“The Heiress.” Cineaste vol. XLIV, no. 3 (fall 2019): 54-56.

“Fighting with My Family.” Cineaste vol.XLIV, no. 2 (summer 2019): 48-49.

“Rocking the Couch.” Cineaste vol.XLIV, no. 2 (summer 2019): 80.

” ‘Look at Me When I’m Talking to You’: Laura Ziskin’s Reboot of the Female Producer,” in Cineaste LXIII, no.3 (summer 2018)

“Babylon Revisited,” Cineaste XLIII no. 2 (spring 2018).

“Lean on Pete,” Cineaste vol. XLIII, no.4 (fall 2018): 47-49.

“I, Tonya.” Cineaste vol. XLIII, no. 2 (spring 2018): 42-44.

“Battle of the Sexes.” Cineaste vol.XLIII, no. 1 (winter 2017): 44-46.

“Marsha Hunt: American Girl, Un-American Woman,” Sight & Sound, 17 October 2017.

“The Anatomy of the Prick Flick,” Cineaste (fall 2017): 20-24.

“The Mary C. McCall Years: When a Woman Called the Shots at the Screen Writers Guild,” Written By: The Magazine of the Writers Guild of America West (Sept-Oct 2017).

“The First Woman President,” Written By: The Magazine of the Writers Guild of America West (June 2017), online exclusive.

“When a Woman Called the Shots at the Screen Writers Guild,” womenandhollywood.com, 14 March 2017.

“Barbara McLean: Editing, Authorship, and the Equal Right to Be the Best,” Cineaste XLII, no. 2 (spring, 2017).

“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).

“Female Editors in Studio-Era Hollywood: Rethinking Feminist ‘Frontiers’ and the Constraints of the Archives.” In Kristin Hole, Dijana Jelača, Patrice Petro, and E. Ann Kaplan (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 (New York: 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.

“High Noon.” Cineaste vol. XLII, no. 1 (winter 2016): 54-55.

“Brief Encounter.” Cineaste vol. XLI, no. 4 (fall 2016): 53-54.

“45 Years.” Cineaste vol. XLI, no. 3 (summer 2016): 46-47.

“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 vol. XLI, no. 1 (winter 2015): 45-46.

“Hollywood as Historian, 1929-1945.” In Cynthia Lucia, Roy Grundmann, and Art Simon (eds.), American Film History Selected Readings(Boston: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015).

“The Western That Got Its Content ‘From Elsewhere’: High Noon, Fred Zinnemann, and Genre Cleansing.” The Quarterly Review of Film and Video vol. 31 (2014): 42-55.

“Against the Beat: Ragtime (1981), Black History, and Postmodernism.” Film Quarterly vol.  67, no.1 (December 2013): 7-13.

“Julia’s Resistant History: Women’s Historical Films 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): 61-91.

“Fred Zinnemann’s Search (1945-48): Reconstructing the Voices of Europe’s Children,” Film History 23:1: 75-92.

“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).

“Jim Crow, Jett Rink, and James Dean: Reconstructing Edna Ferber’s Giant,” American Studies 48:3 (fall 2007): 5-27.

“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 (2006): 179-201. 

“Competing Frontiers: RKO and the Challenge of Cimarron.” In Peter Rollins and John E. O’Connor (eds.), Hollywood’s West, 37-64 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2005).

“Revisioning Modern American History in the Age of Scarface (1932),” The Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 24:4 (2004): 535-563

“Young Mr. Lincoln: Between Myth and History in 1939.” Rethinking History 7:2 (2003): 193-214.