Jennifer Fronc

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Professor Fronc is a historian of the Progressive Era United States, and her scholarship focuses on the role that private, non-state actors have played in social control and the production of social knowledge. Her first book, New York Undercover: Private Surveillance in the Progressive Era (University of Chicago Press, 2009), examined how social activists empowered themselves to police gambling, sexual behavior, interracial sociability, perceived juvenile delinquency, and radical political commitments in the two decades before World War I. Her second book, Monitoring the Movies: The Fight over Film Censorship in Early Twentieth-Century Urban America (University of Texas Press, 2017), begins from the premise that motion picture censorship was an important site at which multiple stakeholders negotiated the role of the state and the meaning of the First Amendment in the early twentieth-century United States. She is currently working on a project about the involuntary commitment of married women to insane asylums during the early 20th century.

• Monitoring the Movies: The Fight over Film Censorship in Early Twentieth-Century Urban America, University of Texas Press, 2017.