Sumiko Higashi is professor emerita in the Department of History at the College at Brockport, State University of New York, and an independent scholar. She is the author of Stars, Fans, and Consumption in the 1950s: Reading Photoplay (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and Cecil B. DeMille and American Culture: The Silent Era (University of California Press, 1994), as well as numerous essays on film history as cultural history, women in film and television, and film as historical representation. She has served on the editorial boards of Cinema Journal, Film History, and Film Criticism.