Vanessa Schwartz is a professor of history, art history, and film at USC, specializing in modern visual culture. Her research and writing in the past decade has concentrated on the emergence of film in the urban culture of late-nineteenth-century Paris. Schwartz’s interests extend into art history, urban studies, and cinema studies. She is the author of Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris and co-editor of Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life and The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader. Her 2007 book, It’s So French: Hollywood, Paris, and the Making of Cosmopolitan Film Culture, argues that we are rethinking postwar relations between France and America; she considers this in the context of the film industry, examining “Frenchness” in film, the Cannes Film Festival, and notions of cosmopolitanism, among other topics. She has recently completed A Very Short Introduction to Modern France and is now working on a history of the jet age.