Shelley Stamp

Professor, Film & Digital Media

Silent Cinema, Female Filmmakers, Film Censorship, Histories of Moviegoing, Early Hollywood

Office: 831-459-4462

Fax: 831-459-1341

Faculty web page

Education and Training:

Ph.D., Cinema Studies, New York University

M.A., Cinema Studies, New York University

B.A., Cinema Studies, University of Toronto

Research Interests:

A leading expert on women and early film culture, I am interested in tracing the contributions women made to early Hollywood as filmmakers, moviegoers, performers, critics and theorists. I have served as a consultant for the National Film Preservation Foundation, Turner Classic Movies and the American Movie Classics cable channel.

My expert commentary has appeared on several DVD releases of rare silent films. My current book project, a study of early filmmaker Lois Weber, is supported by a Film Scholars Grant from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Selected Publications:

BOOKS & EDITED COLLECTIONS:
Movie-Struck Girls: Women and Motion Picture Culture After the Nickelodeon (Princeton University Press, 2000).

American Cinema's Transitional Era: Audiences, Institutions, Practices, co-edited with Charlie Keil (University of California Press, 2004).

"Women and the Silent Screen." A special issue of Film History 18, no. 2 (2006), co-edited with Amelie Hastie.

SELECTED ARTICLES:"1916: Movies and the Ambiguities of Progressivism." In American Cinema of the 1910s: Themes and Variations, edited by Charlie Keil and Ben Singer (Rutgers University Press, 2009), 60-82.“Lois Weber and the Celebrity of Matronly Respectability.” In Looking Past the Screen: Case Studies in American Film History and Method. edited by Jon Lewis and Eric Smoodin. Raleigh, NC: Duke University Press, 2007, 89-116.
“Presenting the Smalleys, ‘Collaborators in Authorship and Direction’.” Film History 18, no. 2 (2006): 119-28

“Lois Weber, Progressive Cinema and the Fate of ‘Our Work-A-Day Girls’ in Shoes,” In Camera Obscura 56 (2004): 140-69.
"It's a Long Way to Filmland": Starlets, Screen Hopefuls and Extras in Early Hollywood," in American Cinema’s Transitional Era: Audiences, Institutions, Practices, ed. Charlie Keil and Shelley Stamp (University of California Press, 2004), 322-52.

"An Awful Struggle Between Love and Ambition: Serial Heroines, Early Celebrity and Modern Femininity." In Silent Cinema Reader, edited by Lee Grieveson and Peter Kramer (Routledge, 2003), 210-25.
"Taking Precautions, or Contraceptive Technology and Cinema's Regulatory Apparatus." In The Feminist Reader in Early Cinema, edited by Jennifer Bean and Diane Negra (Duke University Press, 2002), 270-97."Moral Coercion, or the Board of Censorship Ponders the Vice Question." In Controlling Hollywood: Censorship and Regulation in the Studio Era, edited by Matthew Bernstein (Rutgers University Press, 1999), 41-58 .DVD COMMENTARIES: Traffic in Souls, Perils of the New Land, Flicker Alley, 2008.

Where Are My Children?, Treasures from American Film Archives III, National Film Preservation Foundation, 2007

The Blot, Milestone Video, 2003.

Teaching Interests:

History of American Film, Silent Cinema, Film Noir, Censorship & the Production Code, Female Filmmakers