Catherine Jurca
Professor of English and Visual Culture
B.A., University of California, Berkeley, 1987; M.A., Johns Hopkins University, 1992; Ph.D., 1995. Instructor, Caltech, 1995; Assistant Professor, 1995-2001; Associate Professor of Literature, 2001-04; Associate Professor of English, 2004-10; Professor of English, 2010-21; Professor of English and Visual Culture, 2021-; Master of Student Houses, 2002-09; Executive Officer, 2014-18.
Profile
Catherine Jurca has published on Classical Hollywood film, exhibition history, and the twentieth-century American novel. She studies the relationship between the business history of the major film companies, the movies they made, the theaters that screened them, and the audiences that consumed them. Her book Hollywood 1938: Motion Pictures' Greatest Year, analyzes an unprecedented, industry-wide public
... Read More
Research Summary
Twentieth-Century American Literature and Film; Architectural History; Historic Preservation
Caltech Affiliations
Featured News
New Visual Culture Minor Available to Students
September 20, 2021
Visual culture minors will study media used in film, literature, history, art, and more.
Teaching Film in the Time of Zoom
June 22, 2020
English professor Cathy Jurca makes changes to her introductory film class to adapt to remote learning during the pandemic.
New Visual Culture Program Coming to Caltech and The Huntington
Read more news
December 13, 2018
A grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will allow Caltech to create a new program in visual culture that will involve students, researchers, and artists.
Selected Publications
- Hollywood 1938: Motion Pictures' Greatest Year (University of California Press, 2012).
- White Diaspora: The Suburb and the Twentieth-Century American Novel (Princeton University Press, 2001).
Articles in Cinema Journal, Film History, Representations, The Moving Image, American Literary History, and MLQ.