Call for Papers- Women and the Silent Screen VIII 2015

Women & the Silent Screen VIII: Women, Labor, and Working-Class Cultures
University of Pittsburgh
September 17-19, 2015
Deadline for proposals: JANUARY 5, 2015

WSS is dedicated to advancing film historical and theoretical scholarship about the thousands of women who worked “behind the camera” in international cinema during the silent era. We invite participants to submit proposals for conference presentations. Proposals for twenty-minute presentations must include the title of the presentation, a 200- to 300- word abstract, and a brief autobiographical statement by the author(s). The theme of WSS VIII is “Women, Labor, and Working-Class Cultures” broadly defined, but we also seek research on any aspect of women’s involvement with silent cinema. Proposals might address but are not limted to the following areas: the conditions of women’s labor in the global film industry; the cinema of reform; eugenics; racial privilege; censorship and regulation; scandal; gender and industrial authorship; women and corporate management; cinema and the fashioning of taste; below-the-line labor; women, unions, and craft guilds; post-production work; cinema and segregation, black cinema; women writing for and about the cinema; exchange operations, exhibitors and projectionists; social class and historiography; the poor; locality, ethnicity, and diaspora.

Proposals should be submitted to wssviii@pitt.edu before the January 5, 2015 deadline. Participants should hear from the selection committee by the end of March. Further information and details about WSS VII are forthcoming.