09 Sep September 10, 2025 – Film History Alice Lovejoy and Master of Memory Ron Fry
Alice Lovejoy – Professor at University of Minnesota & Author of Author of Tales of Militant Chemistry: The Film Factory in a Century of War
We know that our smartphones and computers can’t run without rare
earths, without materials that have very violent histories behind them…
what Tales of Militant Chemistry shows is that these present-day
histories are part of a much longer story, one that stretches back to film.
Alice Lovejoy
Alice Lovejoy is a media and cultural historian based at the University of Minnesota, known for her scholarly deep dives into film and media history on a global scale. Her forthcoming book, Tales of Militant Chemistry: The Film Factory in a Century of War (University of California Press, August 2025), weaves a tense narrative of film stock—photosensitive celluloid—as a material enmeshed in warfare, colonial extraction, and environmental fallout. Spanning Kodak’s Tennessee Eastman plants and uranium enrichment at Oak Ridge, to Agfa’s role in Nazi industrialism, Lovejoy reveals how cinema’s chemical underpinnings shaped modern violence. An award-winning author, her first book, Army Film and the Avant Garde (2015), won the MLA’s Scaglione Prize, and she also co-edited Remapping Cold War Media (2022).
Ron Fry – Founder and President of Career Press and Author of Master Your Memory: From America’s Top Expert on Study Skills
I think that if you’re committed, if you’re passionate, if you pick the right books, if you promote them right, if you show people that this is a book that will actually help them, then I think you can have a successful writing career and a successful publishing career.
Ron Fry
Ron Fry is a nationally known proponent for the improvement of public education and an advocate for parents and students, playing an active role in strengthening personal education programs. In addition to being the author of the best-selling How to Study series, which has sold more than 3,000,000 copies to date, Ron has written more than 30 other books in the areas of education and careers. He is the founder and president of Career Press, an internationally known independent publisher of trade nonfiction books.