About

Saverio Giovacchini is a Professor of History at the University of Maryland, where he has served as the director of the Nathan and Jeanette Miller Center for Historical Studies on two occasions (2010-2013; 2021-2022). His research expertise includes Film Studies and Cultural Studies, with a focus on global interaction and exchange, particularly within the context of the United States. Giovacchini is the author of Hollywood Modernism, published by Temple University Press in 2001, and Celluloid Atlantic: Hollywood, Cinecittà and the Cinema of the West, 1943-1973, published by Suny Press in 2025. He has also co-edited the book Global Neorealism: The Transnational History of a Film Style with Robert Sklar, published by the University Press of Mississippi in 2012. His current book project centers on the transnational career of film director Oscar “Budd” Boetticher (1916-2001).

Research topics

• History
• Art history
• Art
• Political science
• Media studies

Selected publications

• African, American: From Tarzan to Dreams from My Father—Africa in the U.S. Imagination

  Journal of American History · 2019-03-02

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  African, American is about change over time. Divided into five chapters, this book describes the alterations that occured in Americans' views of Africa and Africans from the beginning of the twentieth century to the presidency of Barack Obama. Parts of the story are not too surprising: Americans projected their personal desires onto Africa. In the early twentieth century, Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan series of twenty-four books (1912–1966), featuring a racist thug, was popular among white Americans. Long after World War I the novels and films centering this dubious jungle hero placed Africans lower than beasts on the evolutionary ladder. David Peterson Del Mar argues that the Tarzan character was pliable enough to register historical change, particularly in the filmic representations that continued after Burroughs's death in 1950 and well into the twenty-first century. Tarzan acquired a black friend in the director Robert Day's Tarzan the Magnificent (1960). By 2016, in the director David Yates's The Legend of Tarzan, the “vine swinger” had morphed into a social and environmental activist. Tarzan foils Belgian king Leopold I's imperialist plots and brokers a truce between the human and animal realms of the Congo.

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• 3. Postwar Hollywood, 1947–1967

  Rutgers University Press eBooks · 2019-12-31

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• Seeing through the Screen: Interpreting American Political Film

  Political Science Quarterly · 2018-01-01

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• J. E. Smyth. Fred Zinnemann and the Cinema of Resistance.

  The American Historical Review · 2015-04-01

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  Do not expect this important book by film scholar J. E. Smyth to be the definitive biography of the Austrian-American filmmaker Fred Zinnemann. Comprehensive, this book is not. In the first two chapters, Smyth quickly recounts the prewar life of Zinnemann. The director migrated to the United States in 1929 and struggled for almost 15 years in the Hollywood studio system before directing a major film, The Seventh Cross, starring Spencer Tracy, in 1944. These years were an interesting time in the director's life: Zinnemann collaborated with Robert Flaherty, Berthold Viertel, and Paul Strand; met Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin while in Berlin in 1930; shot several short films at MGM; and lost several family members to the Nazi camps. But this book does not mean to be a biography. Instead, Fred Zinnemann and the Cinema of Resistance is a most impressive interpretive essay on this filmmaker, based on thorough research in the Fred Zinnemann Papers at the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Beverly Hills.

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• A Victory “Uneasy with Its Contrasts”

  2015-09-08

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  Saverio Giovacchini examines the intersection of wartime Hollywood and the professional and political commitments of artists on the left, many of whom advocated for films taking an antifascist stance well before America's involvement in World War II. Although wartime cinema with its documentary style and educational orientation marked a breakthrough, it was eclipsed by the anticommunist storm that would come to mark peacetime cinema. In the issue of the short-lived periodical Films, Philip Sterling noted that this had actually been done since the beginning of Hollywood cinema. The 1930 Code, which the Production Code Administration enforced after 1934, stated explicitly that its authors “regarded the function of cinema primarily as entertainment without any explicit purpose of teaching and propaganda ”. In a postwar essay, a frequent collaborator of the Hollywood Left, director Fritz Lang, railed against the Hollywood convention of the happy ending that prevented Hollywood cinema from achieving realism.

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• Cinematic Cold War: The American and Soviet Struggle for Hearts and Minds, by Tony Shaw and Denise J. Youngblood

  American Communist History · 2015-09-02

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Is it useful to compare apples with oranges? They may look different, but they are both round fruits that, as far as your health is concerned, serve many similar purposes. This is the methodologica...

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• Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939

  Journal of American History · 2014-03-01

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• M. Todd Bennett. One World, Big Screen: Hollywood, the Allies, and World War II.

  The American Historical Review · 2013-11-25

  article1st authorCorresponding

  M. Todd Bennett tells the story of World War II efforts by Hollywood and Washington to educate people via cinema. Especially after Pearl Harbor and the establishment of the Office of War Information (OWI) in June 1942, studios and the government decided to collaborate as each could profit from the power of the other. The author neatly organizes the book around themes. Bennett dedicates one chapter to the production of films promoting the war as a collaborative effort that was to be won by a family of allied nations. The following chapters deal with films that sponsored the special relationship between the United States and Britain, and the more ambiguous ones between Washington and the Soviet Union and China. He highlights the intricacy of this double step between studios' and government's honchos. The problems lay both in the difficulties of the task and the complex nature of the collaboration. Americans were not well disposed toward the turbulent world outside their shores, especially after the U.S. intervention in World War I, whose dark side had been highlighted by Republican Senator Gerald P. Nye in his mid-1930s congressional investigation on war profiteering. Many Americans maintained that the British had profited from American help during World War I and that Britain loved its aristocracy and its empire too deeply. Trusting the Soviets and the Chinese was even more problematic. The Soviets had negotiated a pact with the Nazis in 1939 and were devoted to an alien ideology. As for the Chinese, they were viewed as childish Orientals. This book documents a partly unsurprising outcome: that the corporatist double step was more successful when it was easier. Occasional bickering notwithstanding, most Americans acknowledged the British as relatives. It is not surprising, then, that the great film about British endurance under German bombing, Mrs. Miniver (1942), was a hit in America and that by 1945 young Britons whistled American tunes. Washington and Hollywood had more problems representing the Russians and the Chinese. Prejudice kept Sylvia Sidney and Gene Tierney playing Chinese characters in yellowface. It also kept progressive ideas and a talented actress like Anna May Wong away from most Hollywood portraits of China. As for Soviet Russia, political expedience kept truth out of pro-Soviet Hollywood films like Mission to Moscow (1943), which was termed “grotesque” by journalist and former fellow traveler Eugene Lyons (p. 197). Propaganda acrobatics made for a dull film and kept people out of the theaters where Mission played.

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• Introduction

  University Press of Mississippi eBooks · 2011-10-11 · 1 citations

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• In morte di Bob.

  2011-01-01

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Frequent coauthors

• Robert Sklar

  2 shared

• Tracy Robin

  1 shared

• Madhavi Kale

  1 shared

• Kevin R. Murphy

  University of Limerick

  1 shared

• Jane Kaplan

  1 shared

• Barbara Smith

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  1 shared

• David Quigley

  University College Cork

  1 shared

• Amy Richter

  1 shared