Call for Papers: Special Issue of Early Popular Visual Culture: Teaching Silent Cinema Today

Guest edited by Carolyn Condon Jacobs and Aurore Spiers

Silent films are critical teaching tools. In film and media studies classrooms, these films give students a crucial understanding of cinema’s emergence and development. Students engage with the diversity of silent films, from actualités to documentary to fiction to experimental productions. These films encourage aspiring filmmakers to consider the importance of visual storytelling. In other disciplines, silent films may be used as critical primary sources that allow students to witness key historical moments or to see the expansion of art or literature into a new medium. Yet teaching with, and about, silent cinema also comes with unique challenges. Students may come to the classroom with preconceived notions that films made before the widespread adoption of synchronized sound are rudimentary, naïve, or even boring. They may be initially resistant to the unfamiliar acting styles and narrative strategies they encounter. They may find the narratives hard to understand without historical context. Indeed, students will often encounter regressive and offensive ideas about gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and other elements of identity in films made in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. While silent cinema provides many possibilities in the classroom, it also requires special attention and care on the part of educators.

This Special Issue of Early Popular Visual Culture seeks to engage scholars in conversation about how silent cinema is—or could be—taught today. We understand silent cinema in a capacious way, as ranging from the 1890s through the 1920s or 1930s, and as encompassing a variety of global aesthetic, cultural, and social practices. With this in mind, we hope that this Special Issue will be a resource for those who wish to use silent cinema in the classroom or to find new ways of engaging students in the study of silent cinema. We invite submissions from scholars across disciplines who have developed techniques for teaching about and with silent film. Ideally, contributions will reflect pedagogical strategies for diverse groups of students at a variety of teaching and research institutions. We are interested in contributions that share effective tools for teaching silent cinema today and reflect on the unique possibilities and challenges that come with this area of study.

Areas of particular interest include (but are not limited to):

• Making connections between contemporary short-form video (TikTok, YouTube, Instagram Reels, etc.) and the “cinema of attractions” from the 1890s–1900s.
• Employing new original teaching strategies for addressing silent cinema alongside other late-nineteenth/early-twentieth century visual culture.
• Engaging students in the study of silent film through creative projects, video production, and remixing.
• Using digital humanities projects like the Women Film Pioneers Project, Lantern / the Media Digital History Library, Edited By, and the Audiovisual Lexicon for Media Analysis, in the classroom.
• Designing new syllabi that center traditionally marginalized and minoritized filmmakers and movie workers, for example, women-identifying filmmakers and movie workers, race filmmakers like Oscar Micheaux, and filmmakers from the global South.
• Using anti-racist and inclusive pedagogy to teach silent cinema.
• Using silent cinema as a tool for teaching media literacy.
• Strategies for teaching with non-extant films or incomplete or poor-quality copies and prints.
• Teaching with silent cinema in disciplines other than film and media studies.
• Using silent cinema to examine global histories of political and social movements.
• Using—or avoiding the use of—generative AI when teaching silent cinema.
• Strategies for teaching silent cinema in remote and asynchronous formats.
• Community-engaged learning designed around silent cinema.

We welcome proposals for either long papers (6,000 words) or short papers (2,000–3,000 words). If you are interested in contributing to this issue, please send a brief proposal of around 300 words, together with the title, format (long or short paper), up to five references, a short bio, contact details, and institutional affiliation to the editors of the Special Issue, Carolyn Condon Jacobs (carolyn.jacobs@ccsu.edu) and Aurore Spiers (aspiers@tamu.edu), by September 5, 2025. We will notify you of acceptance by October 5, 2025. A manuscript will be expected by February 6, 2026.