Katherine Parkin, Ph.D., Jules Plangere, Jr., Endowed Chair in American Social History and professor in the department of History and Anthropology, is featured on a podcast “Blood Alley,” part of the Death on the Lot series produced by Adam McKay (“The Big Short,” “Vice,” “Succession”).
The series examines 1950s Hollywood and the untimely death of stars such as James Dean, Hattie McDaniel, and John Garfield. The eight-episode podcast aims to tell “the story of how Hollywood sold us on a new American Dream, and left a few unlucky stars holding the bag.”
Parkin joins episode four as an expert on American car culture to shed light on the “life of James Dean, a restless man-child desperate to express himself in uptight post-World War II America. The original Rebel Without a Cause, and the prototype for a new kind of American teenager who longed to escape Mayberry.”