[Commlist] Call for Papers: Eastern European Genre Cinema

Following confirmation of firm interest from Routledge, Anna Batori is 
seeking contributions for the forthcoming volume ‘*Eastern European 
Genre Cinema: Forms, Histories, and Transnational Circulation*’.

This edited volume examines genre cinema in Eastern Europe as a 
historically neglected but industrially central mode of film production. 
While scholarship on Eastern European cinema has largely privileged 
auteur cinema, political modernism, and national art-film traditions, 
popular genres – including horror, science fiction, crime film, 
melodrama, thriller, comedy, and exploitation – have received 
comparatively limited scholarly attention. Yet, genre cinema offers a 
crucial lens through which to rethink Eastern European film history – 
particularly in relation to socialism, post-socialist transformation, 
industrial restructuring, transnational circulation, and changing 
audience formations.

Rather than treating genre as derivative of Western models, the 
collection demonstrates how Eastern European cinemas adapt, hybridize, 
and transform genre conventions under specific political, economic, and 
cultural conditions.

The book aims to bring together film scholars working across different 
national contexts to analyse genre production from the socialist period 
to the present, foregrounding both historical continuities and 
contemporary transformations. It aims to explore how genre functions not 
only as a narrative system but also as an industrial strategy, 
ideological vehicle, and site of cultural negotiation.

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

·Socialist crime cinema and the policing of ideology

·Science fiction under state socialism

·Comedy as coded political critique

·Socialist melodrama and domesticity

·Historical epics and nation-building under socialism

·Horror after 1989: trauma, body, and transition

·Crime cinema and neoliberal violence

·Thriller and corruption narratives

·Gangster films and new capitalism

·Folk horror and regional mythologies

·Post-socialist gothic spaces

·Posthuman bodies and machinic subjectivity in Eastern European science 
fiction

·Auteur/genre hybridities in contemporary cinema

·Eastern European genre films in global festivals

·Netflix and transnational genre production

*Submission Guidelines:*

Contributors are invited to submit proposals for chapters that align 
with the scope of the volume.

The central objective is to foreground genre cinema rather than art cinema.

Proposals from PhD students and early-career scholars are particularly 
welcome.

·Abstract submission: please submit an abstract of 250-300 words, 
together with a short author(s) biography of 100-200 words to: 
*(anna.batori /at/ gmx.net)*

·Deadline for abstract: *15 June 2026.*

·Notification of acceptance to authors: 1 July 2026.

·Contributions are expected to be 6,000-7,000 words, incluging 
references, footnotes.

·Full chapter submission: 1 November 2026.


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