[Commlist] cfp: Future of German Screen Studies Conference

A final reminder for this Friday's deadline to submit proposals for the 
Future of German Screen Studies conference!

*CfP “The Future of German Screen Studies: Cultures, Media, Histories” 
<https://germanscreenstudies.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk/2023/11/17/cfp-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 and 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, insidious 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.


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