Jennifer Horne is a film and media historian whose scholarship focuses on the histories of American moving image media as civic and instructional discourse, from the late 19th-century to the late 20th-century. Her research examines those film and media practices frequently overlooked by studies of mainstream media but nonetheless central to an understanding of mass media as public sphere and as a locus of civic participation.
Prof. Horne is currently completing a book-length study of film in American everyday life in the 1910s and 1920s, tracing uses of educational film by women's clubs, service organizations, charity groups, government agencies, and public libraries. She plans to continue this work on film and civic life in a second book on the film and mass media operations of the United States Information Agency. That project will examine sponsored filmmaking and cultural diplomacy in the context of the Cold War, and will focus on the international mass media activities of the State Department and the United States Information Agency outside of the US after World War II.
She has served on the National Film Preservation Board and is on the Advisory Board of the journal Camera Obscura.
“‘Neutrality-Humanity’: The Humanitarian Mission and the Films of the American Red Cross,” Beyond the Screen: Institutions, Networks, and Publics of Early Cinema, eds. Charlie Keil, Rob King, and Paul S. Moore. New Barnet, Herts, UK: John Libbey, 2012. 11–18.
“A History Long Overdue: The Public Library and Motion Pictures,” Useful Cinema, eds. Haidee Wasson and Charles Acland. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. 213–257.
“Experiments in Propaganda: Reintroducing James Blue’s Colombia Trilogy.” The Moving Image 9.1 (Spring, 2009): 183–200.
“Nostalgia and Nonfiction in Edison’s Conquest Program.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 22.2 (August 2002): 315–32.