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

“Who Controls the Past.” Times Literary Supplement, November 14, 2025.

“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.