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We'll Always Have the Movies
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Robert McLaughlin, Associate Professor of English, and Sally Parry, Associate Dean of College of Arts and Sciences, recently published We’ll Always Have the Movies: American Cinema During World War II—a project for which they viewed more than 600 films made between 1937 and 1946, analyzing the cultural and historical importance of these films in explaining the war to moviegoers. According to McLaughlin and Parry, “These films were more than just an explanation of historical events: they asked audiences to consider the Nazi threat, they put a face on both our enemies and allies, and they explored changing wartime gender roles.” Publishers Weekly calls the work an “essential volume” explaining “the process by which actual events become film history and by which film history becomes myths” and contends that the authors “maintain a scholarly tone, treating blockbusters and B-movies with equal rigor, but never forgetting the view from the peanut gallery or the history and movie buffs among them.”

McLaughlin earned his Ph.D. in English from Fordham University in 1987. He also holds an M.A. and B.A. in English from Fordham University. He joined Illinois State’s Department of English in 1988.  McLaughlin has been widely published in scholarly journals such as Pynchon Notes and symploke. He is the editor of Innovations: An Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Fictions. In 2003, he won the College of Arts and Sciences’ College Outstanding Teacher Award. He currently serves as the director of Undergraduate Studies for the Department of English.

Parry earned her Ph.D. in English from Fordham University in 1986.  She holds an M.A. in English and a B.A. in Communication from Fordham University. Parry has served as Assistant to the Executive Director of the Modern Language Association and is the author of numerous scholarly articles. She is editor of Go East Young Man: Sinclair Lewis on Class in America and The Minnesota Stories of Sinclair Lewis.

We’ll Always Have the Movies will be released March 1.
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