J. E. Smyth is a historian, critic, and Professor of History at the University of Warwick.
Smyth has written and edited several books, including a new edition of Jane Allen’s Hollywood novel, I Lost My Girlish Laughter (Random House, 2019) and Nobody’s Girl Friday (Oxford University Press, 2018), a history of the many high-powered women who worked in the golden age of the Hollywood studio system (1924-1954).
She was awarded the Richard Wall Special Jury Prize by the Theatre Library Association, the International Association of Media Historians’ Michael Nelson Prize, a Choice Outstanding Academic Title, and the Association of American Publishers Award. She was a Getty Research Institute scholar-in-residence and contributed to the award-winning PBS documentary, Children of Giant (2015).
She was awarded an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences film scholar grant in 2021.
Her latest book, Mary C. McCall Jr.: The Rise and Fall of Hollywood’s Most Powerful Screenwriter, was published by Columbia University Press in September 2024 and was profiled in the Observer in July 2024.
Books in order of publication:
Reconstructing American Historical Cinema: From Cimarron to Citizen Kane – 2006
Edna Ferber’s Hollywood: American Fictions of Gender, Race, and History – 2009
Hollywood and the American Historical Film – 2011
From Here to Eternity – 2015
Nobody’s Girl Friday: The Women Who Ran Hollywood – 2018
Mary C. McCall Jr.: The Rise and Fall of Hollywood’s Most Powerful Screenwriter – 2024
Oak Lawn Library Friends 