20th/21st Century

Film, New Media, Theory

Research Interests

Although Fine formally retired in September 2021, he is still professionally active. His current research lies in the general area of media history and more specifically concerns the media’s relationship to the American military since World War II.  Earlier in Fine's career he focused on the history of authorship and on copyright and intellectual property law. Fine was hired as the American studies person in the department, and his teaching focused on American literature and history since 1900, and on film. Fine also taught the core historical course in the MATX program for a number of years.

Select Publications

• The Price of Truth: The Journalist Who Defied Military Censors to Report the Fall of Nazi Germany. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2023. 
• “Allied War Correspondents’ Resistance to Political Censorship in World War II,” Allied Communication during the Second World War, National and Transnational Networks, Eds. Simon Eliot and Marc Wiggam. London: Bloomsbury, 2019.
• “The Development of the ‘Pyle Style’ of War Reporting: French North Africa, 1942-43,” in Newspapers, War and Society in the 20th Century: Journalism, Reportage and the Social Role of the Press, Eds. Siȃn Nicholas and Tom O’Malley.  London: Routledge, 2019.
• “Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s The Vietnam War,” American Journalism 35.1 (2018): 96-104.
• “American Authorship and the Ghost of Moral Rights.” Book History 13 (2010): 218-250. 
• West of Eden: Hollywood and the Profession of Authorship. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993.  
• James M. Cain and the American Authors’ Authority.  Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1992.