Scholar - Women Also Know History

Participant Info

Keywords: Hollywood History, American Women Writers, Anita Loos, Jazz Age Hollywood, Women in Film, 1920s Hollywood, Modernist Literature, celebrity, Classical Hollywood

About Me: I’m an Associate Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno. In other roles, I’ve launched a popular film studies minor, directed a large interdisciplinary humanities program, and administered a writing center.

I’ve written three books about film and American Culture: Silent Film and U.S. Naturalist Literature (Routledge), Kelly Reichardt: Emergency and the Everyday (co-authored with Nicole Seymour, University of Illinois Press), and Hollywood’s Others: The Babies, The Nobodies, The Unhappy (currently under review). I have also published close to twenty articles on U.S. film and literature, including three on Anita Loos. Two of these articles have won the most prestigious awards in her field: the William Riley Parker Prize and the 1921 Prize in American Literature.

I have researched and written extensively on Hollywood and celebrity, with articles and book chapters about child stars of the 1920s, Black performers during Jim Crow, fan magazines, star suicides, Lon Chaney’s disability “drag,” and deepfakes of Marilyn Monroe, among other topics.

I’m currently writing a biography about Anita Loos: screenwriter, author of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and woman you’d want to sit next to you at a dinner party.

Recent Publications

Books:

Hollywood’s Others: The Babies, The Nobodies, The Unhappy. Under review.
With Nicole Seymour. Kelly Reichardt: Emergency and the Everyday. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017.
Silent Film and U.S. Naturalist Literature: Time, Narrative, and Modernity. New York: Routledge, 2016.

Articles:

“Neither Typist nor Genius: Hollywood as Workplace in the John Emerson and Anita Loos How-to Guides.” Feminist Modernist Studies. 2023. https://doi.org/10.1080/24692921.2023.2293628
“Girls Who Can’t Say No: Marilyn’s Playboy, Digital Resurrections, and the Matter of Posthumous Consent.” Accepted to Incomplete: The Feminist Possibilities of Unfinished Film, Eds. Alix Beeston and Stefan Solomon. Oakland: University of California Press, 300-321.
With Lynda Olman, “Techniques of Justice: W.E.B. Du Bois’s Data Visualizations and the Problem of Representing the Race.” MELUS 46.3 (2021): 1-29.
“Feminist (Dis)Pleasure and Anita Loos’s Whisper Networks.” Feminist Modernist Studies 2.3 (October 2019): 340-347.
“Sexing Farina: Racial Fantasies of Episodic Gender in the Hal Roach Our Gang Comedies.” PMLA Vol 133. 3 (May 2018): 526-541.