Cross-Race Casting and Racial Passing: A continuation of an ongoing summer project in histories of silent and sound cinema in development as a website on the model of Columbia Libraries humanities databases. in order to illustrate the careers of an unusual range of actors and actresses who transformed themselves into a range of racial types in the first decades of American cinema. Central to the project is the documentation of the life and film career of African American Noble M. Johnson (1907 – 1948). Johnson was a remarkable talent who “put on and took off” a wide range of ethnicities as a character actor but who also passed as white in the last 30 years of his life. Before Johnson, who spans the silent and the sound eras, there were actors and actresses such as Japanese-American Tsuru Aoki who took the part of a native American in early Westerns. The project is broadly interested in the questions of genre and star image theory as well as the internationalization of the film industry.

Responsibilities: primary photographic research as well as online image collection, image tagging (dating, credits) and overview writing.