[ecrea] CFP Turning the page

Call for papers



Turning the Page: Digitalization, movie magazines and historical 
audience studies

A Conference organized by NoRMMA, CIMS and DICIS
Ghent University (Ghent, Belgium), 12 and 13 November 2015

Keynotes: Geneviève Sellier, University of Bordeaux; Eric Hoyt, 
University of Wisconsin-Madison





NoRMMA, the University of Kent’s Network of Research: Movies, Magazines 
and Audiences, and CIMS, the Ghent University’s Centre for Cinema and 
Media Studies, will be holding a conference on the impact of 
digitalization for the study of movie magazines and historical 
audiences. The conference is supported by the Digital Cinema Studies 
network DICIS. Proposals for papers are now invited.



The recent advances in research made by proponents of New Cinema History 
underline the importance of extending the field of scholarly focus 
beyond the film text to the wider movie-going experience. While material 
objects such as company records, theatre ledgers and fan letters have 
now gained a respectable place in this research, the movie magazine, 
whether fan or trade, still seems to be neglected or regarded with 
suspicion. This is perhaps due to the fan magazines' reputation for 
purveying scandal and gossip, their frequent mingling of gushing tone 
and blatant falsehood. Since the trade papers were aimed at industry 
insiders, theatre owners and exhibitors, studio employees and agents, 
periodicals such as Variety, The Hollywood Reporter and Motion Picture 
Herald have also been overlooked as somehow biased towards business 
interests. However, by treating movie magazines as the objects of 
primary rather than secondary research, important findings can be generated.



As Anthony Slide has noted, in their heyday from 1920s to 1950s, there 
were around 20 major movie magazines on offer every month at American 
newsstands (2010: 3), with more offered in Europe and across Latin 
America; trade publications, though sold to and for different markets, 
were also produced in steady numbers within each country involved in 
film production and distribution. This resulting material gives 
investigators a huge potential resource for study, especially now that 
the digitalization of periodical collections is becoming more common. 
With the Media History Digital Library making multi-issues of both fans 
and trades available for download, one of the major problems with 
working on these publications – access – is partially solved, for 
researchers now and in the future when even fewer of these ephemeral 
artefacts may remain physically available.

Robert Scholes and Sean Latham, modernist magazine scholars, announced 
the birth of a new academic area of interest in 2006, periodical 
studies, and noted further that “The rapid expansion of new media 
technologies over the last two decades…has begun to transform the way we 
view, handle, and gain access to these objects. This immediacy, in turn, 
reveals these objects to us anew, so that we have begun to see them not 
as resources to be disaggregated into their individual components but as 
texts requiring new methodologies and new types of collaborative 
investigation.” (PMLA 121.2) The networks hosting this conference 
believe that the study of movie magazines can be just as revealing to 
film and cultural historians as the highbrow Modernist and Little 
Magazines, and that the fans and trades equally demand “new 
methodologies and new types of collaborative investigation.”



This conference therefore aims to bring together researchers whose work 
examines movie magazines intended for any audience and from any period 
or locale. We hope to attract colleagues from a wide range of 
disciplines who wish to pose questions about how to read these 
artifacts, how to interpret them, and how to assess the impact of 
digitalization on periodical research. We are seeking abstracts for 
individual papers and panels of three or four contributors on topics 
including, but not limited to:



* the advantages and potential disadvantages of digitalisation

* comparative studies of a topic in the trades and fan magazines

* imagining/recovering the audience of the fan magazines

* reading movie magazines as extensions of the cinema-going experience

* idiosyncrasies of national models of movie magazine – alternatives to 
the Hollywood template

* methodologies for working with the fans and trades

* issues of censorship and industry regulation

* cross-overs in methods and objects of research between the areas of 
magazine, and periodical, studies

* we are particularly keen to see proposals that cross the borders 
between academia and industry, and/or archives and libraries



Please send abstracts of 300 words and a 100-word biography to 
(normma.network /at/ gmail.com) by 15 May 2015, and address any queries to the 
same email. After the conference, you may be invited to submit a revised 
version of your paper for consideration in a special issue or edited 
volume to be organized by the planners.



Conference committee: Tamar Jeffers McDonald & Lies Lanckman, University 
of Kent (UK) * www.normmanetwork.com /// Daniël Biltereyst & Lies Van de 
Vijver, Ghent University (Belgium) * www.cims.ugent.be * 
www.digitalcinemastudies.com





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