Professor Thomas Doherty held the Fulbright Distinguished Research Fellowship at the RIAS during the Fall of 2018. ​Thomas Doherty is Professor of American Studies at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, where he teaches courses in media and cultural history with a special interest in Hollywood cinema.

His project for the Roosevelt Institute for American Studies was his book-in-progress: a study of the media coverage of the 1932 kidnap-murder of the twenty-month-old baby of the most admired man in America, Charles Lindbergh, and the murder trial of the accused perpetrator, Bruno Richard Hauptmann. The book is titled Little Lindy Is Kidnapped: How the Crime of the Century Shaped the Modern Media.

His most recent book is Show Trial: Hollywood, HUAC, and the Birth of the Blacklist (Columbia University Press, 2018).  Among his other books are Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939 (Columbia University Press, 2013) and Hollywood’s Censor: Joseph I. Breen and the Production Code Administration (Columbia University Press, 2007). He is also an associate editor for the film magazine Cineaste and film review editor for the Journal of American History.

Read here Professor Doherty’s report on his fellowship at the RIAS in 2018.

In 2020 Thomas Doherty wrote an article on “What FDR’s polio crusade teaches us about presidential leadership amid crisis” that can be downloaded here.