Judith Smith

teaches courses on American Studies method, history and media in 19th and 20th century US, social history of US women, and US since 1945.  All of her courses explore changing historical  and social frameworks that shape how people experience  racial, ethnic, and gendered boundaries, and  recurring class-based  contests over  public and cultural authority. Her earlier research in social history explores the cultures of solidarity growing out of immigrant work and family lives for southern Italian and eastern European Jewish immigrants in an East Coast commercial industrial city from 1900-1940. Her recent research moves the study of families to cultural history, exploring how popular family stories circulating in literary, dramatic, and cinematic forms offered competing  frameworks for imagining citizenship and democracy during WWII and into the Cold War years, as multi-ethnic and white or as multi-ethnic and multi-racial. Her current research project, “Black and White in Color: Hollywood’s Civil Rights Imagination, 1949-1969,” analyzes the variety of film genres, from social problem films to color musical extravaganzas, commenting on the social possibilities for democratic citizenship no longer fundamentally structured by segregation.

Selected Publications:

“Jews in Live television Drama,” in Jews in American Popular Culture, ed. Paul Buhle (Praeger, 2006)

Visions of Belonging:  Family Stories, Popular Culture and Postwar Democracy, 1940-1960 (Columbia University Press, 2004)

“Radio’s "Radio's 'Cultural Front:' 1938-1948," in Radio Reader:  Essays in the Cultural History of Radio, ed. Michelle hilmes and Jason Loviglio ( Routledge, 2002)

Family Connections:  A History of Italian and Jewish Immigrant Lives in Providence, Rhode Island, 1900-1940 (State University of New York Press, 1985)

Co-Editor, with Lois Rudnick and Rachel Rubin, American Identities:  An Introductory Textbook (Blackwell, 2005)

Co-author, with Howard Chudacoff, Evolution of American Urban Society (Pearson Prentice Hall, 2004, 2000, 1994, 1988)

office: Wheatley Fifth floor Room 58
email: judith.smith@umb.edu
phone: 617-287-6774