Leo Braudy

Leo Braudy (born June 11, 1941) is 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 is best known for his cultural studies scholarship on celebrity, masculinity, and film, and is frequently sought after for interviews on popular culture, Hollywood cinema, and the American zeitgeist of the 1950s.

Braudy was born in Philadelphia, PA. He is the son of Edward and Zelda (Smith) Braudy; he received his B.A. from Swarthmore College in 1963 and his M.A. 1963 and Ph.D. 1974 from Yale University. He is married to the painter Dorothy McGahee Braudy. They live and work in Los Angeles.

Leo Braudy's books cover topics spanning literature, film, and other art forms, often with an eye toward understanding the impact of history on artistic form and the cultural expression of feelings. His books have been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and have been included among the Los Angeles Times' "Best of the Best Books of the Year" and the New York Times' "Outstanding Books of the Year." He is best known for The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and its History (Oxford, 1986); and From Chivalry to Terrorism: War and the Changing Nature of Masculinity (Knopf, 2003). His most recent book is Haunted: On ghosts, witches, vampires, zombies and other monsters of the natural and supernatural worlds (Yale University Press, 2016). Each of these works address changing cultural and historical definitions of what otherwise seem to be innate and unchanging emotions and attitudes--the desire for fame, the concept of masculinity, the shape of fear.

Along with Marshall Cohen, he also co-edits the widely used anthology Film Theory and Criticism (Oxford, 8th ed. 2016).

His 2006 book, On the Waterfront (British Film Institute), is a study of the film's production, the post-war values it reflects, and the controversy surrounding Elia Kazan's testimony before the House Unamerican Activities Committee. In 2011 "The Hollywood Sign" appeared in Yale University Press's American Icons series. It traces the intertwined history of Hollywood and the Sign from the founding of the city as a prohibitionist enclave in the 1880s through the beginnings of the movies, the construction of the Sign in the 1920s as a real estate advertisement, and the mixed fortunes of both the Sign and the film business down to the present.

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