Jeff Smith is a Professor of Film Studies in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of WisconsinMadison, where he earned his Ph.D. He is the author of two books: The Sounds of Commerce: Marketing Popular FilmMusic (1998) and Film Criticism, the Cold War, and the Blacklist: Reading the Hollywood Reds (2014). He has also published several articles and book chapters on the role of sound and music in American cinema. He is currently at work on a book that traces development of the classical Hollywood film score during the 1930s that examines how studios allocated musical resources to films based on their position within the hierarchy of prestige pictures, programmers, and B films.
