MARIANNE CONROY is Visiting Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and American Studies. She received her Ph.D. in English and Film Studies from the University of Chicago. Before coming to Maryland, she taught at McGill University and Hampden-Sydney College. She is the author of several essays on late twentieth-century American film and consumer culture, including "Acting Out: Method Acting, the National Culture, and the Middlebrow Disposition in Cold War America" (CRITICISM); "'No Sin in Lookin' Prosperous': Gender, Race, and the Class Formations of Middlebrow Taste in Imitation of Life" (THE HIDDEN FOUNDATION, eds. David James and Rick Berg); and "Discount Dreams: Factory Outlet Malls, Consumption, and the Peformance of Middle-Class Identity (SOCIAL TEXT). She has received research support from the Whiting Foundation. She is currently at work on a book that explores the constructions of middlebrow taste and cultural capital in the Hollywood films of the 1950s. She regularly teaches courses in film and critical theory. Her scholarly interests include film history and theory, popular culture, Marxist cultural theory, postmodernism, feminism, and critical race studies.

mc215@umail.umd.edu