Vanessa R. Schwartz is visiting us in Autumn 2008. She is Professor of History, Art History and Film and directs the Visual Studies Graduate Certificate. An historian on modern visual culture, she was trained in Modern European History with a concentration on France and urban culture at Princeton (Phi Beta Kappa, 1986) and UC Berkeley where she received her Phd in 1993. The author of It’s So French! Hollywood, Paris and the Making of Cosmopolitan Film Culture (University of Chicago, 2007) and Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in fin-de-siècle Paris (University of California, 1998), she is now working on the French reception of Pop Art and the work of Jacques Demy and is writing a book about “the jet age.” She has also co-edited two volumes, Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (California, 1995) and The Nineteenth Century Visual Culture Reader (Routledge, 2004). She co-edited a special issue of Urban History (Cambridge, 2006) with her colleague, Phil Ethington, called “Urban Icons” which includes a multi-media companion.