Steven J. Ross is co-director of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities and a professor of history at USC, where he teaches courses in popular culture and American social and film history. He holds degrees from Columbia, Oxford, and Princeton University. He is the author of Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America; Movies and American Society; Workers on the Edge: Work, Leisure, and Politics in Industrializing Cincinnati, 1788-1890; and numerous articles on film and social history. His current book, Hollywood Left and Right: How Movie Stars Shaped American Politics, is slated to be published in spring 2011. Ross has received a Film Scholars Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Photo by Irene Fertik