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The Women Film Pioneers Project Relaunches!

On the eve of our 6-year anniversary, the Women Film Pioneers Project (WFPP) is excited to relaunch a reimagined and invigorated home for our thriving digital resource. This redesign enhances our commitment to the advancement of research on women filmmakers in the silent era. 

Our design updates focus on improving reader experience and accessibility across the website, making the text more readable and improving navigation through and between content. The redesign also features an improved image viewing experience, a reimagined news archive, and new, clearer guidance on how to use our unique resource and contribute to our publication 

A reorganization of WFPP’s Resources Index highlights vital contributions to our research community with an unmatched collection of bibliographies, current events, and digital and audio-visual tools. We have also made information about archival materials around the world more accessible. Archival paper collections referenced in pioneer profiles now link to the institution where they are held or directly to an online finding aid, when available; Filmographies now directly link to online catalogues or websites for film archives around the globe, providing immediate access to the holding organization for a particular film title. 

Screenshot of Women Film Pioneers Homepage Screenshot of old WFPP homepage

We value our authors and their contributions to our scholarly community and bring increased visibility to their work with this relaunch. Recognizing the importance of WFPP as a scholarly resource, each profile and overview essay has now been archived and given a DOI, aiding in citation and discoverability of our content by researchers. As WFPP continues to grow and evolve, we will be able to provide versioned records of articles via these archives, creating a historiographic record of the study of women in silent cinema.

Pioneer profiles on our site have been updated to include “Research Update” boxes, when relevant. These sections will highlight new career or credit information and/or archival film discoveries, ensuring that developments in silent film research are continually accessible and foregrounded. 

With this relaunch, we are delighted to debut Projections, a forum for original scholarship, multimedia content, and digital-friendly approaches to silent film research and feminist scholarship. Projections posts will take the form of self-reflexive essays, online curatorial projects, image galleries, data visualizations, multimedia analyses of a particular film, research updates, and more. Inaugurating this exciting multimedia section is Kiki Loveday’s queer reading of Alice Guy’s early films with the timely “Do You Believe in Fairies? Cabbages, Victorian Memes, and the Birth of Cinema: Seeing Sapphic Sexuality in the Silent Era.”

Screenshot of pioneer profileScreenshot of pioneer profile

Screenshot of bibliographies on WFPPScreenshot of resources on WFPP