[Commlist] CFP Future of German Screen Studies

_Call for Papers:_

/*"The Future of German Screen Studies: Cultures, Media, Histories”*/

/*A conference to be held at the University of St Andrews 19^th -21^st 
 June, 2024 */

*/Keynote Speakers/: Seán Allan (University of St. Andrews), Erica 
Carter (King’s College London), Johannes von Moltke (University of 
Michigan) *

*/Organisers/: Paul Flaig Dora Osborne *

*/Deadline for submitting proposals/: _February 16th, 2024_*

What is the future of German Screen Studies in the face of ongoing 
technological transformation, heightened cultural and political strife, 
and historical crises at levels national, European and global? By what 
new methods or concepts might scholars and students, in the face of such 
possibilities and challenges, explore German-language cinematic, 
televisual, streaming or site-specific screen media, whether from the 
historical past, the contemporary moment or a fast-approaching future? 
Addressing these and other state-of-the field questions, this conference 
will offer a forum to consider the future of German Screen Studies. 
Drawing on the rich utopian vein in German thought (Adorno and Bloch, 
Kluge and Tawada), Leslie Adelson (2017) describes a “future sense” that 
allows one to perceive, in the face of historical catastrophe, not only 
a more hopeful time to come, but also, counterfactually, a radically 
different relationship to a seemingly settled past. With this “future 
sense” in mind, the conference organisers invite submissions creatively 
situated between the most recent developments, in topic, method or 
argument, within German Screen Studies and this field’s extraordinary 
legacy of scholarship, criticism and debate from across the last 
century, from Emilie Altenloh’s 1914 dissertation to Hito Steyerl’s /The 
Wretched of the Screen/ (2012), Siegfried Kracauer to Miriam Hansen, 
Harun Farocki to Thomas Elsaesser.

As these and other figures suggest, the field of German Screen Studies 
has always had a productively porous relationship with other 
disciplines, from media studies to art history, sociology to philosophy, 
as well as to various sites of artistic, literary and political 
practice. It has approached German histories of the moving image as much 
through genre and auteur as through visual analysis and historical 
context, critical theory and technical medium. Through both translation 
and interpretation, German screen scholars have introduced a range of 
influential methods and concepts to the humanities at large, variously 
drawing on the heady intellectual and artistic culture of German silent 
cinema, the methods and theories of the Frankfurt School, insidiously 
modes of fascist propaganda, debates around representation and the 
Holocaust, the experimentalism of numerous avant-garde movements, 
feminist and queer modes of documenting or dramatizing gender and desire 
and archaeologies of visual media both analogue and digital. The epoch 
of the moving image has corresponded to Germany’s tumultuous modern 
history, spanning /Kaisereich/ and Weimar democracy, Nazi dictatorship 
and divided, then reunified republics, with both stark divisions and 
underlying continuities between each era’s media landscape. This 
tumultuous history has required German screen scholars to navigate a 
complex set of moments and movements, institutions and industries: UFA 
and DEFA, Berlinale and Oberhausen, state-funded television and Netflix 
series, /Autorenkino/ and video installation, /Heimatfilm/ and the 
Berlin School. This is not to mention the varied extra-territorial links 
between German screen cultures and the wider world, from the 
circulations of emigres and exiles, immigrants and refugees to 
international co-productions and global media conglomerates. The current 
challenges preoccupying many of the Berlin Republic’s screen artists and 
performers—resurgent populism, technological acceleration, ecological 
crisis, economic precarity—might thus best be studied through an 
approach both transnational and interdisciplinary.

“The Future of German Screen Studies” aims to take stock of our current 
understanding of these and others /cultures/, /media/ and /histories/ in 
order to map where this field may be heading as well as offer new 
genealogies of those images, figures and texts that have thus far 
defined it. Beyond those mentioned above, topics of papers and panels 
may also include but are not limited to:

-German Screen Studies in the time of the Anthropocene

-Queer genealogies from Weimar culture to Fassbinder to the Teddy Award //

-Animals and cyborgs, plants and things: The post-human on-screen

-The politics and practice of remembering, archiving and re-mixing 
German screen history

-Representations and reflections of racial and/or ethnic difference

-New media historiographies and archaeologies versus canonical 
chronologies and familiar periodizations

-German-language genres familiar and neglected, popular and cult

-Colonial connections and post-colonial circulations

-Documentary modes from travelogues and propaganda to essay films and 
experiments //

-Art cinema’s institutions, auteurs and aesthetics

-The politics of gender behind the camera and below the line //

-The “small” screen, from early televisual experiments to transnational 
streaming hits //

-German Screen Studies meets German media theory (Kittler, Ernst, 
Vismann, Siegert)

-Avant-garde legacies across cinema, television and visual arts

-New methods of Scholarship, Criticism and Communication: Audio-Visual 
Criticism, Podcasting, Blogging, Social media

-Teaching and Pedagogy challenges and possibilities post-COVID, pre-AI 
and amidst an Anglophone crisis in language learning

Please submit proposals of 250-300 words to (pf49 /at/ st-andrews.ac.uk) 
<mailto:(pf49 /at/ st-andrews.ac.uk)> and (do38 /at/ st-andrews.ac.uk) 
<mailto:(do38 /at/ st-andrews.ac.uk)> by 16^th  of February, 2024.

A limited number of bursaries are available to contribute to travel and 
accommodation costs for post-graduate and early career speakers.

This event is funded by the DAAD (German Academic Exchange) as part of a 
three-year Promoting German Studies networking grant to the German 
Screen Studies Network (https://germanscreenstudies.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk/ 
<https://germanscreenstudies.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk/>), co-directed by Dora 
Osborne and Paul Flaig.


---------------
The COMMLIST
---------------
This mailing list is a free service offered by Nico Carpentier. Please use it responsibly and wisely.
--
To subscribe or unsubscribe, please visit http://commlist.org/
--
Before sending a posting request, please always read the guidelines at http://commlist.org/
--
To contact the mailing list manager:
Email: (nico.carpentier /at/ commlist.org)
URL: http://nicocarpentier.net
---------------