Jean Mudge Productions logo
 Jean Mudge Productions: Films, Videos & Books About Historic America

ABOUT US

 

Jean Mudge (Jean Mudge Media) has been making documentary films and videos as well as producing books and articles on notable American subjects for over forty years. Her award-winning series on Early American Writers has been shown on PBS and is still in educational distribution.

Mudge’s work has grown with her professional interests in the interdisciplinary field of American Studies. After graduating from Stanford University in a Humanities Honors Program in 1955, two years later she earned a master’s degree in Early American Culture as a Winterthur Fellow at the University of Delaware and the Henry F. du Pont Winterthur Museum. After starting a family (three children) while living with her husband in Geneva, Switzerland, she returned to the field as a Danforth Fellow, earning a Ph.D. in American Studies at Yale University in 1973.

Mudge’s films and videos draw upon her background in U.S. history, literature, and art history, particularly a series on early American writers. Her film, “Emily Dickinson: A Certain Slant of Light” (1978), narrated by Julie Harris, was made while she was the first resident-curator of the Dickinson Homestead, owned by Amherst College. The Dickinson book on which the film was based, Emily Dickinson and the Image of Home (U Mass Press, 1975) had its start in her Yale Ph.D. thesis of the same title. Two other films in this series followed, “Herman Melville: Consider the Sea” (1980), and “Edgar Allan Poe: Architect of Dreams” (1982). All three were award-winners and aired on PBS. Also shown on PBS was another film about 19th-century pioneer in higher education for women, “Mary Lyon: Precious Time” (1986).

Mudge’s books follow the same interdisciplinary approach as her films. Her two works on Chinese export porcelain (University of Delaware Press, 1962; Clarkson N. Potter, 1986) researched in several foreign archives, museums and private collections, combine history and art history. Export ware — custom made in China for avid European and American markets — symbolizes the West’s cultural and capitalistic imperialism in the East. (The first millionaires in America were in the U.S.-China trade.) The Dickinson book and another study, The Poet and the Dictator: Lauro de Bosis Resists Fascism in Italy and America (Praeger, 2002) include literary criticism. An overview of post WWI European aviation backgrounds American-Italian De Bosis’s solo flight over Rome in 1931 to drop 400,000 resistance leaflets. On his return, he and his plane disappear, but he leaves an eloquent final protest message, “The Story of My Death,” published in leading world newspapers.

Mudge edited and contributed essays to Mr. Emerson’s Revolution (Open Book Publishers, Cambridge, UK; online, 2015). Biography, history and philosophy come together in this new examination of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s complex rise as one of America’s most germinal 19-century reformers. It also traces his wide reception in Europe, India and the Far East. In 2022, Mudge wrote the script for a documentary produced by Recombinant Films LLC, “Beating Superbugs.” (Her Recombinant partner and son, Bill Mudge, directed.). A primer about solutions to antibiotic resistance, the film has received laurels from many world festivals. The original film and an updated version, “Beating Superbugs Better” (2024), are now streaming on YouTube and other channels. A noted Scandinavian scientist found this film the best he’s seen on the subject. An American chemistry researcher and professor recommends it for science curriculums at any level.

While overseeing production of the superbug film, Mudge wrote a book about a Northern California landscape watercolorist, “Discovering Charlotte Hersey Colby” (2023). Born in Oakland in 1864, Colby was Mudge’s great-aunt and the grand-aunt of her cousin and fellow researcher, Katharine Hermann. Colby’s story, set in the Bay Area, illuminates its surprisingly early vigorous art scene. Colby began exhibiting soon after graduating from San Francisco’s California School of Design in the 1880s.

Since 2023, Mudge has been working on “War Front, Home Front: A Memoir of a U.S. Army General and His Family from Pearl Harbor to Korea and Beyond.”