About

Shelley Stamp is a professor of Film + Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she has taught for almost 30 years and has twice won the Excellence in Teaching Award. She is a film historian and curator, known for her award-winning books Lois Weber in Early Hollywood and Movie-Struck Girls: Women and Motion Picture Culture after the Nickelodeon. She is also the curator of the award-winning 6-disc set Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers and has authored numerous articles on women’s filmmaking and moviegoing. As the Founding Editor of the journal Feminist Media Histories, published quarterly by the University of California Press, she currently edits the Feminist Media Histories book series for UC Press. Her research has been funded by notable organizations including the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and a University of California President’s Fellowship. From 2018 to 2021, she served as campus Presidential Chair, reflecting her distinguished contributions to her field.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Aesthetics
• Art
• Artificial Intelligence
• Political Science
• Psychology
• Computer Science
• Social psychology
• Theology
• Environmental health
• Psychoanalysis
• Art history
• Philosophy
• Medicine
• Gender studies
• Law

Selected publications

• LOIS WEBER: EARLY HOLLYWOOD’S FORGOTTEN PIONEER

  Edinburgh University Press eBooks · 2025-06-20

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• Audiences and Moviegoing Cultures

  Cinema and Media Studies · 2024-01-09

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  Scholars have studied movie audiences almost since the beginning of cinema, eager to understand the medium’s impact on its viewers. When movies first became the dominant mass commercial entertainment form in the early decades of the 20th century, social scientists, progressive reformers, and cultural theorists were drawn to study the audiences gathered for this new medium and the new culture surrounding moviegoing as a favorite pastime. By mid-century, the Hollywood industry commissioned serious “audience research” to understand its customers and bolster its bottom line. In the 1970s and 1980s, film historians began studying historical movie audiences, challenging monolithic theories of film spectatorship developing at the time. Studies of moviegoing, as opposed to film viewing, focus on the social experiences of going to the movies and the social dynamics within viewing spaces. They are attentive to the emotional investments of fan culture, dating culture, and cinephilia often attached to moviegoing. While much of the initial scholarly research on movie audiences focused on early cinema in the United States, scholarship has grown to encompass many global contexts and to consider factors like transnational film consumption, diasporic audiences, and colonialism. And many scholars are attentive to newer patterns of film consumption that include watching films on video or streaming services. The methodologies used to chart moviegoing and movie cultures vary enormously, with some researchers relying on ethnographies and oral histories, some drawing information from marketing campaigns and the popular press, while others mine business records, cultural geographies, and industry trade papers. Scholars study audiences and moviegoing cultures by looking at the varied sites where movies are consumed, including commercial cinemas, art house theaters, film festivals, museums, prisons, and private homes. Others study the materiality of moviegoing, considering food we consume at the movies and the chairs we sit in. In each case, scholars look beyond the screen to study the social and cultural dynamics of cinema and cinemagoing. Additional information related to audiences and moviegoing cultures can be found in the separate Oxford Bibliographies in Cinema and Media Studies articles “Fan Studies,” “Exhibition and Distribution,” and “Censorship.” See also the bibliography on “Television Audiences.” There is considerable research on the broader phenomenon of mass media audiences, which is not included in this bibliography.

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• Curiosity Seekers, Morbid Minds, and Embarrassed Young Ladies

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2024

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Psychology
  • Psychoanalysis
  • Aesthetics

  Abstract Many American films were made on abortion and birth control in the mid-1910s during the height of a national debate about these topics. Feature films dramatized sensational stories of unplanned pregnancy and abortion; public health films provided instruction on childbirth and infant care; and activists in the fight to legalize contraception turned to cinema to promote their cause. Many of these films espoused conservative views on matters of reproduction, family planning, and female sexuality. But by examining the films’ promotional materials and the critical discourse that surrounded them, it becomes clear that the culture in which these films were exhibited, promoted, and discussed offered female moviegoers tactics for contesting the regressive attitudes championed onscreen.

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• The American Girl Goes to War: Women and National Identity in U.S. Silent Film

  Canadian Journal of Film Studies · 2023

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Gender studies
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• What Happened to Women in Histories of Hollywood?

  Journal of women's history · 2021-01-01 · 1 citations

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  What Happened to Women in Histories of Hollywood? Shelley Stamp (bio) Emily Carman. Independent Stardom: Freelance Women in the Hollywood Studio System. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016. 236 pp.; ISBN 9781477307816 (pb); 9781477307311 (cl); 9781477307335 (ebook). Jane M. Gaines. Pink-Slipped: What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industries? Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018. 328 pp.; ISBN 9780252041815 (cl); 9780252083433 (pb); 9780252050480 (ebook). Erin Hill. Never Done: A History of Women’s Work in Media Production. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016. 288 pp.; ISBN 9780813574875 (cl); 9780813574868 (pb); 9780813574882 (epub); 9780813589978 (Kindle); 9780813574899 (PDF). Maya Montañez Smukler. Liberating Hollywood: Women Directors and the Feminist Reform of 1970s American Cinema. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2019. 364 pp.; ISBN 9780813587486 (cl); 9780813587479 (pb); 9780813587493 (epub); 9780813587509 (PDF). J. E. Smyth. Nobody’s Girl Friday: The Women Who Ran Hollywood. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. 328 pp.; ISBN: 9780190840822 (cl). Vital conversations are happening today about equity and inclusion in the entertainment industry. But these discussions have often been framed without a consideration of history, as if we are witnessing the first generation of women to work behind the scenes in Hollywood, the first to push for gender equity, the first to assume positions of creative control, or the first with hopes of transforming gender norms through images onscreen. This is not the case, but the narrative is no accident. As J. E. Smyth reminds us in her book Nobody’s Girl Friday: The Women Who Ran Hollywood, winner of the Special Jury Prize from the Theatre Library Association, “the image of studio power” that dominates the popular imagination “is emphatically and obnoxiously male” (89). A cadre of feminist film historians has been steadily and methodically dismantling this fiction over the past three decades; this body of scholarship reaches an exciting new level of intervention with a recent collection of award-winning volumes. [End Page 162] Much of the pioneering work in feminist film history focused on the early years of moviemaking, the so-called silent era before films had prerecorded soundtracks, when women occupied prominent positions of creative control as directors, screenwriters, and producers, and when female audiences were paramount.1 Books by Smyth, Emily Carman, Erin Hill, and Maya Montañez Smukler take the tools pioneered by scholars of silent cinema and apply them to studies of later eras of Hollywood production, while Jane Gaines’s book offers a fresh perspective on the silent era itself. Many of these scholars draw on methodologies honed in production studies, a subfield that seeks to understand the complex conditions in which film and media products are created. Alongside Smyth’s study of the “women who ran Hollywood” during the height of the studio era, Emily Carman documents how actresses pushed against restrictive studio contracts in the 1930s to assert greater control over their careers in Independent Stardom: Freelance Women in the Hollywood Studio System, which was a finalist for the Theatre Library Association’s Richard Wall Memorial Award. In Never Done: A History of Women’s Work in Media Production, winner of the Best First Book Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Erin Hill shows us that women have always worked on the margins of the film business, doing everything from clerical work to custodial work from the earliest years of moviemaking to the present, and that feminized labor has been essential to motion picture production. In Liberating Hollywood: Women Directors and the Feminist Reform of 1970s American Cinema, which won the Theatre Library Association’s Richard Wall Memorial Award, Maya Montañez Smukler completely rewrites standard histories of “New Hollywood” in the 1970s by highlighting the work women did behind the scenes to fight for equity and industry reforms. Finally, in her book Pink-Slipped: What Happened to the Women in the Silent Film Industries?, a Choice Outstanding Academic Title, Jane Gaines returns to the silent era, pondering the fate of the first generation of female filmmakers in the early twentieth century who were “pink-slipped” (released from employment) by the industry and then ignored in subsequent histories. Erin Hill’s Never Done provides a wealth of information about the...

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• Taking Precautions, or Regulating Early Birth-Control Films

  Duke University Press eBooks · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  • Medicine
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• 3. Women’s Labor, Creative Control, and “Independence” in a Changing Industry

  2019-05-07

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• 1916: Movies and the Ambiguities of Progressivism

  Rutgers University Press eBooks · 2019-12-31

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• Film noir’s ‘gal producers’ and the female market

  Women s History Review · 2019-12-25 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This article surveys publicity surrounding the work of three female producers active in Hollywood in the 1940s and early 1950s: Joan Harrison, Virginia Van Upp, and Harriet Parsons. All three produced key titles in the cycle of film noir that emerged during this period. Publicity that emphasized their work behind the scenes on these productions was part of broader attempts to cultivate a female audience for film noir. Marketing campaigns suggested that ‘gal producers’ catered to unconventional feminine appetites for criminality and violence, all the while celebrating their ascendance in the traditionally male-dominated profession of producer. Such profiles would have been particularly appealing to female moviegoers during the Second World War, when many women held jobs previously dominated by men, and in the immediate postwar period when they sought to retain those lucrative positions.

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• 4. “Exit Flapper, Enter Woman”; or, Weber in Jazz Age Hollywood

  2019-05-07

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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Frequent coauthors

• Miranda J. Banks

  1 shared

• Dana Polan

  1 shared

• Michèle White

  1 shared

• Ralina L. Joseph

  University of Washington

  1 shared

• Charlie Keil

  University of Toronto

  1 shared

• Amelie Hastie

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Presidential Chair, UC Santa Cruz, 2018-21
• Excellence in Teaching Award, UC Santa Cruz, 2019
• Pavel Machotka Chair in Creative Studies, UC Santa Cruz, 201…
• Macgeorge Visiting Fellow, University of Melbourne, Australi…
• National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, 2012