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Faculty & Staff

Areas of Expertise

U.S. Social and Cultural History, Ethnicity and Immigration, Women’s History, Urban History, Film and History of Media

Degrees

PhD Brown University

Professional Publications & Contributions

• Becoming Belafonte: Black Artist, Public Radical (Forthcoming, Univ. of Texas Press)
• "Judy Holliday's Urban Working Girl Characters in 1950s Hollywood Film,”A Jewish Feminine Mystique: Jewish Women in Postwar America (Rutgers University Press, 2010).
• “Jews in Live Television Drama,” in Jews in American Popular Culture, ed. Paul Buhle (Praeger, 2006).
• Co-Editor, with Lois Rudnick and Rachel Rubin, American Identities: An Introductory Textbook (Blackwell, 2005).
• 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).
• Co-author, with Howard Chudacoff, Evolution of American Urban Society (Pearson Prentice Hall, 2004, 2000, 1994, 1988).
• Family Connections: A History of Italian and Jewish Immigrant Lives in Providence, Rhode Island, 1900-1940 (State University of New York Press, 1985).
• “Civil Rights, Labor, and Sexual Politics on Screen in Nothing But a Man (1964), Black Camera 2012.

Additional Information

Research and Teaching Interests:

Professor 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 World War Two 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.

Works in Progress:

Black and White in Color: Hollywood’s Civil Rights Imagination, 1949-1965.

On her sabbatical leave 2011-2012 Professor Smith worked on a short book, titled Becoming Belafonte: Black Artist, Public Radical, forthcoming from the University of Texas Press. Becoming Belafonte analyzes the emergence of Belafonte as a charismatic singer and the significance of his labor-based transnational folk musical performances between 1951 and 1970, on tour and in recordings, as well as of his television and film production, for audiences in the US and around the world. Growing up black and working-class in New York City and Jamaica in the 1930s, discovering a political language about race and nation in the Navy during WWII, and absorbing the creative ferment associated with left-wing theater and music in New York City in the late 1940s, Belafonte fashioned a distinctive form of cultural expression foregrounding multiple forms of black artistry and multi-national hybridity. Belafonte distinguished himself from his cohort of black and white entertainers by his willingness to use his celebrity to speak in public on issues of civil rights and human rights, in spite of censorship in the Cold War years, and in dialogue with the circles around Martin Luther King, Jr. and the  SNCC activists in the 1960s.

Courses Taught:

AMST 100 American Identities
AMST 215 America on Screen
AMST L 393 Social History of American Women
AMST 410 Cultural History of the US Media
AMS 601 Introduction to the Literature of American Studies
AMST 604  History of Gender and Sexuality in US Society and Culture

Further Information:

http://jsmith.wikispaces.umb.edu/