ABOUT US
Jean Mudge
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2009!
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JEAN MUDGE PRODUCTIONS (JMP) has been making documentary films and videos as well as producing books and articles on notable American subjects for over thirty years. Its award-winning series on Early American Writers has been shown on PBS and is still in distribution. A documentary on Ralph Waldo Emerson, with interactive website and companion book, will be the fourth in this series.
JMP has grown with the professional interests of Jean Mudge in the interdisciplinary field of American Studies. After graduating from Stanford University in a Humanities Honors Program, she earned a master’s degree in Early American Culture as a Winterthur Fellow at the University of Delaware and the Henry F. du Pont Winterthur Museum. After starting a family, she returned to the field as a Danforth Fellow, studying for her doctorate in American Studies at Yale University.
JMP’s films and videos draw upon Mudge’s background in history, literature, and art history, particularly a series on early American writers. Her film, “Emily Dickinson: A Certain Slant of Light,” was made while she was the first resident-curator of the Dickinson Homestead, owned by Amherst College. There, she also wrote the book, Emily Dickinson and the Image of Home.
JMP’s books also reflect Mudge’s interdisciplinary training. Her two studies of Chinese export porcelain combine history and art history to show the chinaware as a colorful symbol of the historic contact between East and West. The Dickinson book and a new study, The Poet and the Dictator: Lauro de Bosis Resists Fascism in Italy and America, include literary criticism. And the de Bosis story discusses the history of modern Italy, including Fascism, as well as early aviation.
Mudge will edit and plan the illustrations for the forthcoming book, Mr. Emerson’s Revolution, a companion piece to the video-in-progress of the same name. Ten Emerson experts are contributing a chapter each to the book, to be published by the University of Michigan Press in 2009.