Warners' War: Politics, Pop Culture & Propaganda in Wartime Hollywood Contributors  Leo Braudy is a university professor and Bing professor of English at the University of Southern California, where he teaches 17th and 18th century English literature; film history and criticism; and American culture. He has previously taught at Yale, Columbia and Johns Hopkins University. He frequently appears as a commentator on film and popular culture on television, and he’s written for The New York Times, Washington Post Book World, International Herald Tribune, London Sunday Express, Times Literary Supplement, Film Quarterly and Harper’s. He has served on the editorial boards of ELH, Film Quarterly, Raritan Review, PostScript, Eighteenth-Century Life and Prose Studies, and he is a member of the Usage Panel for The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. His books include The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and its History ; The World in a Frame: What We See in Films ; and Jean Renoir: The World of His Films, which was a finalist for the National Book Award in Arts and Letters. His most recent book is From Chivalry to Terrorism: War and the Changing Nature of Masculinity.
Johanna Blakley is the assistant director of the Norman Lear Center, where she performs and directs research on a wide variety of topics, including celebrity culture, global entertainment and fashion and intellectual property law. Her essay “Entertainment Goes Global: Mass Culture in a Transforming World,” has been taught in several courses in the U.S. and abroad. Blakley has guided more than forty manuscripts through the publication process at the Lear Center, including Television’s Changing Image of American Jews, Frank Capra and the Image of the Journalist in American Film and Artists, Technology & the Ownership of Creative Content. She received a PhD in English from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she taught courses on popular culture and 20th century literature. Blakley has held a variety of positions within the high-tech industry, including Web producer, digital archivist and research librarian.  Randi Hokett is director of the USC Warner Bros. Archives, part of the School of Cinema-Television, where she is responsible for the preservation of historical photos, set drawings, animation art and documents. She also assists private researchers, aids in the selection of extra features for classic Warner Bros. DVDs and conducts her own research. A visual and cultural historian, Hokett has a BA in art history and an MA in art history and museum studies from USC. She has worked at Bower’s Museum, The UCLA Hammer Museum and Cultural Center and The Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Hokett has published essays, educational materials and gallery guides on 20th century Russian, Cuban and Mexican artists. She is currently interested in popular film as the convergence of visual expression, popular culture and contemporary societal attitudes.
Selma Holo is the director of University Galleries and the Graduate Museum Studies Program at USC. Previously, Holo was the curator of aquisitions at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena. She received her BA in Spanish language and literature from Northwestern University and later earned her MA and PhD in art history. Her publications reflect her expertise in Goya, Picasso and Ribera. Holo has frequently chaired the American Association of Museum’s accreditation site visitation committees. She received a Senior Fulbright Research award and has published and lectured in Spain and Latin America, and represented the West Coast at the first Pan American conference of museum professionals. Holo has lectured in Brazil, Venezuela and Argentina. Her book, Beyond the Prado: Museums and Identity in Post-Franco Spain, was published by the Smithsonian Press in 1999, by Liverpool University Press in 2001 and in Spanish by the Akal Press 2001. Martin Kaplan is the director of the USC Annenberg Norman Lear Center and associate dean of the USC Annenberg School for Communication. He was a summa cum laude graduate of Harvard in molecularbiology, has a First in English as a Marshall Scholar at Cambridge University in England and a PhD in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University. He was an Aspen Institute program officer; a federal education staffer; Vice President Walter F. Mondale’s chief speechwriter; a Washington journalist in print, television and radio; deputy campaign manager of Mr. Mondale’s 1984 presidential campaign; a Disney Studios vice president of motion picture production; and a film and television writer and producer. His film credits include The Distinguished Gentleman, starring Eddie Murphy (screenwriter and executive producer) and the screen adaptation of the play Noises Off, directed by Peter Bogdanovich.  Dana Polan is a professor of critical studies at the USC School of Cinema-Television. His areas of interest include American film, especially from the 1940s, recent American film and French culture.
Polan’s publications include Politics of Film and the Avant-Garde (1981); Power and Paranoia: History, Narrative and the American Cinema, 1940-1950 (1986); and the British Film Institute’s books on Pulp Fiction (2000), Jane Campion (2002) and In a Lonely Place (1994). He translated several significant French works and served as director of the Paris Center for Critical Studies, a study-abroad program for advanced students of film history and aesthetics, contemporary French thought and French literature. Polan received a knighthood from the French Ministry of Culture in recognition of his cross-cultural contributions, and he holds a Doctorat D’Etat from the Universite de la Sorbonne Nouvelle.
Steven J. Ross, chair of the USC history department, studies the changing nature of power in American society. He currently researches how films shape ideas about class and power in the 20th century—especially what it means to be working class or middle class in America. Ross has published Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America. His current project, Hollywood Left and Right: Movie Stars and Politics, examines the emergence of Hollywood as a major center of American politics and the role that movie stars have played in the political life of the nation from the beginning of the 20th century to the present. Ross is the co-director of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities. Nancy Snow is an assistant professor in the College of Communications at California State University, Fullerton and a senior fellow at the USC Center for Public Diplomacy. She is the author of Propaganda, Inc.: Selling America’s Culture to the World and Information War: American Propaganda, Free Speech and Opinion Control Since 9/11 (Seven Stories Press, 2003). She served most recently as a public diplomacy advisor to the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy and the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee overseeing changes in U.S. public diplomacy legislation since 9/11. Snow regularly writes and speaks on U.S. foreign policy, American persuasion, influence and propaganda. Betty Warner Sheinbaum is a professional sculptor and painter. She is also the president of Fairtree Foundation, which supports minority groups, education and legal aid. Warner Sheinbaum founded and directed the Galeria de Sol in Santa Barbara and Fairtree Gallery in New York. She has always been politically active—she and her friends formed the Westwood Democratic Club in 1939; she actively protested the Vietnam War; and she helped run her husband’s two congressional campaigns. She toured Africa with Senator George McGovern and Latin America with Edward Kennedy. Warner Sheinbaum was born in 1920 in New York City. She is the daughter of Harry Warner, founder and president of Warner Bros. Studios. Warner Sheinbaum attended Mills College and UCLA, and is the mother of four, grandmother of eight and great-grandmother of three. | 
