Laura Wittern-Keller

With a bachelor's degree in history and English from the State University of New York at Albany, a master's degree in history from the Pennsylvania State University, and a PhD from the University at Albany, Wittern-Keller is a history professor. She has taught at Castleton State College in Vermont, at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington (UNCW), and is currently in the history department at the University at Albany. Her research has focused on the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech and film censorship. From that research have come her first two books, Freedom of the Screen: Legal Challenges to State Film Censorship, and The Miracle Case: Film Censorship and the Supreme Court (co-authored with Ray Haberski). Her next published work came in an exciting new edited collection called Silencing Cinema (international perspectives). Silencing Cinema was published in 2013 by Palgrave. Another chapter has recently appeared in another great edited volume titled Hollywood and the Law (BFI/Palgrave, 2015). Her next book is Meddling with Movies, a study of all the ways movie content has been affected in the US, from the Hollywood Production Code to governmental censors, military review of war movies, and airline editing of in-flight entertainment.

To learn more, moviecensorship.com