CALL FOR PAPERS: Women and the Silent Screen VI (Bologna, Italy, June 24–26, 2010; Director: Monica Dall’Asta)

Sponsored by the Università di Bologna (Dipartimento di Musica e Spettacolo – Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia), Women and Film History International, Regione Emilia-Romagna, Cineteca di Bologna, and the Biblioteca Italiana delle Donne, the Sixth International Women and the Silent Screen Conference will celebrate the diversity of women’s engagement with silent cinemas across the globe through a series of scholarly panels, keynote addresses, and archival film screenings.

We invite papers and panels not only on the directors, screenwriters, producers, and actors of the era, but also on the role of women in modern mass culture, broadly considered. Continuing the dynamic spirit that characterized previous conferences in Utrecht (1999), Santa Cruz (2001), Montréal (2004),  Guadalajara (2006), and Stockholm (2008) the conference will provide an open and friendly atmosphere for the exchange of research and insight into women’s involvement in the first four decades of film history.

Papers and panels might consider

• Words, wordlessness, and bodily expression
• Divas and antidivas
• Audiences, moviegoers, and fans
• Theorists, critics, and writers
• Body genres
• Serial screen narratives
• Motion picture economies and gendered divisions of labor
• Global and local exhibition practices
• The social realities of World War I
• Feminist historiography and the transnational
• The modern as period and problematic
• Synchronized sound: transition, continuity, and the question of change
• The archives: theory, practice, politics
• Feminist theory and the silent screen

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Submission Deadline: January 20, 2010 (Electronic Submission of Proposals: http://wss2010.wfhi.org)