Lea Jacobs was born on January 12, 1957, in Passaic, New Jersey.[2] After obtaining a BA in University of California, San Diego in 1977, she did graduate studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, obtaining an MA in 1981 and PhD in 1986.[2] Her doctoral dissertation, Reforming the fallen woman cycle: strategies of film censorship, 1930-1940,[3] was supervised by Janet Bergstrom.[4]
After working at the Rockefeller Foundation as a postdoctoral fellow from 1987 to 1988, Jacobs joined the University of Wisconsin–Madison, as an assistant professor of communication arts.[2] She was promoted to associate professor in 1994 and full professor in 1999,[2] eventually becoming professor emeritus.[1] She was a 1994 fellow of UW Madison's Institute for Research in the Humanities,[2] a 2002 Guggenheim fellow, and a 2010-2011 American Council of Learned Societies Fellow.[5] In 2013, she became Associate Vice-chancellor for Arts and Humanities at UW Madison.[5]
As an academic, Jacobs focuses on American film.[1] She has written four books: The Wages of Sin (1991) on the evolution of fallen women cinema due to Hollywood censorship;[6] Theatre to Cinema (1997; co-authored with Ben Brewster), on the relationship between stage visual effects and their early film counterparts;[7] The Decline of Sentiment (2008), on the change of values in 1920s American film;[8] and Film Rhythm After Sound (2015), on the history of film technology during the transition between silent film and sound.[9] Her next book, John Ford at Work, examines the career of John Ford in relation to evolving film technology, will be released in October 2025.[10]
In 2002,[11] she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for "a study of the decline of sentiment in American silent film."[2] In addition to film history, she has also taught animation history at UW Madison.[1]
