Pamella Lach

Ph.D. Candidate
plach@email.unc.edu

Major Field: U. S. History

Other Fields: Cultural History; Gender History; Global History

Advisor: Peter Filene

Research Interests: My dissertation uses Hollywood musicals to revise more traditional narratives of postwar America that overlook the radical potential of the fifties. Musical motion pictures, as cultural products of mainstream Hollywood, brimmed with spectacular song-and-dance routines that transcended spoken language, blurring fantasy and reality. Those elements of fantasy, which morality censors and red-baiting senators considered little more than indirect forms of expression, obscured but never fully veiled the social and ideological agendas of the filmmakers and actors. Musical moments therefore opened up safe avenues for individual self-exploration. Through song and dance, performers -- and by implication filmmakers and audiences as well -- could carve out their own unique, and often nonconforming if not wholly deviant, identities. By situating the musical within a changing entertainment industry, this project reveals how artistic expressions, audience tastes, musical intonations, and bodily movements encouraged Americans to re-imagine their gendered, racial, sexual, and national identities within and beyond rigid social norms.