Steven J. Ross is Professor of History at the University of Southern California. He is co-founder and co-director of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities and the author of "Workers on the Edge: Work, Leisure, and Politics in Industrializing Cincinnati "(1985) and "Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America "(1998), which won the Theater Library Association Book Award. Ross is a recipient of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Film Scholars Award.