Dr. Emily Carman

Dr. Emily Carman

Associate Professor
Film and Media Studies
Lawrence and Kristina Dodge College of Film and Media Arts
Expertise: American and Classic Hollywood Cinema; Media Historiography; Women in Film; Moving Image Archival Theory, Practice and Restoration;
Office Location: Becket Building 209
Phone: (714) 628-7232
Scholarly Works:
Digital Commons
Education:
University of Florida, Bachelor of Arts
University of California, Los Angeles, Master of Arts
University of California, Los Angeles, Ph.D.

Biography

Industry Affiliations: UCLA Film and Television Archive; USC Warner Bros. Archives; USC Cinematic Arts Library; Society of Cinema and Media Studies; Association of Moving Image Archivists; the Academy Film Archive

Emily Carman primarily teaches courses on American cinema and media history. She is also a fellow at the Ferrucci Institute for Italian Experience and Research. Since 2012, she has led a Chapman travel course to Bologna, Italy that brings students to the Il Cinema Ritrovato Film Festival.

Her research and teaching interests include American film history, (specifically Studio-era Classic Hollywood), archival-based research, and media historiography, as well as film genres (film noir and the Western), moving-image archival theory and practice, film censorship, gender and stardom, and media industry studies. 

Carman is the author of Independent Stardom: Freelance Women in the Hollywood Studio System (University of Texas Press, 2016), which was a finalist for the Theatre Library Association’s 2016 Richard Wall Memorial Award, and co-editor of the anthology Hollywood and the Law (BFI/Palgrave MacMillan, 2015). She is currently writing a book about John Huston’s 1961 Western The Misfits as a transitional film through which to understand the important cultural and industry shifts from Classical to New Hollywood.

Her scholarship has appeared in Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Celebrity Studies, The Moving Image, and Cinephile as well as in anthologies, including United Artists and Back in the Spotlight: Female Celebrity and Ageing.

Carman has worked for various motion picture archives and cultural institutions, including the USC Warner Bros. Archives; the Academy Film Archive; the UCLA Film and Television Archive; and L'Immagine Ritrovata at the Cineteca di Bologna.

Carman has been interviewed by national newspapers and respected news outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, Variety, Entertainment Weekly, CBS News, the BBC and NPR. She also been interviewed to appear in several film and television documentaries and podcasts about Hollywood luminaries and film history.

Recent Creative, Scholarly Work and Publications

Last Remaining Seats: Auntie Mame pre-screening panel, Los Angeles Conservancy, the Million Dollar Theater, Los Angeles, CA, June 17, 2023.
Archive Talks: The Misfits, UCLA Film and Television Archive, Billy Wilder Theater, March 19, 2023.
“Misfit Revision: Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable, and Transitional Stardom in Postwar Hollywood,” Cinephile 17.1 (Summer 2023): 37-45.
“When Women Ruled Hollywood: Scholars Respond” Women They Talk About: Discovering America’s Female Film Pioneers, American Film Institute (AFI) Catalog, March 2023.
“Going Independent in 1930s Hollywood: Freelance Star and Independent Producer Collaborations at United Artists," United Artists, edited by Yannis Tzioumakis and Gary Needham, Routledge Hollywood Centenary series, 2020, 57-74.
“From Mary Pickford to Marilyn Monroe: Hollywood Stardom in the Twentieth Century,” Screen Studies, Bloomsbury, Spring 2019
“New Histories of Hollywood Roundtable,” Spectator 37.2 (Fall 2018): 60-81.
"Film History Comes Alive: Primary Materials Research as Participatory Pedagogy,” edited by Laura Isabel Serna and Kate Fortmueller, in Cinema Journal Teaching Dossier Volume 4 (3), June 2017.
Independent Stardom: Freelance Women in the Hollywood Studio System, University of Texas Press on editor Professor Thomas Schatz's " Texas Film and Media" series, 2016
Independent Stardom Onscreen: Freelance Women in Hollywood Film Series and Book Signing, UCLA Film and Television Archive Billy Wilder Theater, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA, April 16-May 26, 2016
"Stardom and Film Historiography: Onscreen Legend and Off-screen Practice in Robert Aldrich’s The Big Knife (1955),” Cinephile 11.2 (Winter 2016): 10-16.
“In Focus: The State of Academic Publishing,” co-edited with Ross Melnick, Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies, UCSB, Cinema Journal 55.4 (August 2016), 130-132.
Hollywood and the Law, BFI/Palgrave Press, co-editor and contributor, 2015.
"Doing the Deal." Co-author Philip Drake, in Hollywood and the Law, BFI/Palgrave Press, 2015.
"Mapping the Body: Female Film Stars and the Reconstruction of National Identity in Postwar Italy," Quarterly Review of Film and Video, , 31.4 (2014): 322-335.
"Hollywood is a Woman’s Town: Freelance Stardom and Aging in the Studio System" in Celebrity Studies, 3.1 (March 2012): 13-24; reprinted in Female Celebrity and Ageging: Back in the Spotlight (London: Routledge, 2014);
"That’s Not All, Folks!: Excavating the Warner Bros. Archive." The Moving Image , 14.1 (Spring 2014): 30-48.
"Independent Stardom: Female Film Stars and the Studio System in the 1930s." Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal (Fall 2008): 583-615