History

Senior Lecturer

Office: 309, 25 Gordon Square
Office hour: on sabbatical 2012/13
External phone: 020 7679 3625
Internal phone: 33625
E-mail: m.stokes@ucl.ac.uk

I work principally on American film history. I am particularly interested in the study of movie audiences and have now organised two large conferences and co-edited five books on the subject. I am also interested in the intellectual and political, and cultural aspects of Progressivism. I teach an MA course on Hollywood and the History of American Popular Film. I teach a year-long course for undergraduates on American History in Hollywood Film, a one-term course on Approaches to American Cinema and a third-year Group III/special subject on Progressivism and Progressive thought.

My publications are now almost entirely in film history.

Areas of Research Supervision

 -The history of American cinema

 -The history of cinema reception and audiences

 -More general American cultural history

Theses Currently Supervised

 -Representations of the Los Angeles Police Department in American films produced between World War II and the beginning of the twenty-first century

 -Images of Women in Film and Popular Culture during the 1930s

Theses Previously Supervised

  -Disney's Women - Changes in Depictions of Femininity of Disney's Animated Feature Films

  -Constructing white Texas maleness: from the Texas Centennial of 1936 to the aftermath of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963

 -Miscegenation in Mainstream Hollywood Cinema: Representing Interracial Relationships, 1913-1956

 -American Looks: Sportswear, Fashion and the Image of Women in New York, 1929-1947

Select Publications 

Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby, eds., Hollywood Spectatorship: Changing Perceptions of Cinema Audiences (London: British Film Institute Publishing, 2001)

Ed., The State of US History (Oxford: Berg Press, 2002)

Melvyn Stokes, Reynold Humphries and Gilles Menegaldo, eds., Cinéma et mythes (Poiters: University of Poitiers, 2002)

Richard Maltby and Melvyn Stokes, eds., Hollywood Abroad: Audiences and Cultural Exchange (London: BFI Publishing, 2004)

D. W. Griffith’s ‘The Birth of a Nation’: A History of ‘The Most Controversial Motion Picture of All Time’ (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007)

Richard Maltby, Melvyn Stokes and Robert C. Allen, eds., Going to the Movies: Hollywood and the Social Experience of Cinema (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2008)

Melvyn Stokes and Gilles Menegaldo, eds., Cinéme et histoire: Cinema and History (Paris: Michel Houdiard, 2008)

Gilda (London: BFI Publishing, 2010)

‘Race, Politics and Censorship: D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation in France, 1916-1923,’ Cinema Journal, 50:1 (Fall 2010), 19-38

‘Abraham Lincoln and the Movies,’ American Nineteenth Century History, 12:2 (Summer 2011)

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