2025 BRUSSELS & ANTWERP, BELGIUM

The 2025 Women and Film History International conference committee is thrilled to announce the Twelfth International Women and the Silent Screen Conference: “Form and Feeling in Silent Cinema."  The conference is hosted by the Université libre de Bruxelles, University of Antwerp, and Royal Film Archive of Belgium (Cinematek) in Brussels, Belgium, from June 11-14, 2025. Please mark your calendars!

Feeling has become an urgent focal point in the development of a feminist, queer and decolonial praxis and theory – whether as sensation, emotion, passion, care, sentiment, or affect – upending a long and well-documented history of dismissal. Women and the Silent Screen XII (WSSXII) invites papers that revisit the relationship between feeling and form across diverse media, modes, and genres, historical and geographical contexts, and against the backdrop of new theoretical, ethical and political constellations. We encourage historiographic interventions into the expansive array of formal, material, institutional and cultural expressions of feeling and emotion that constitute global silent cinema from its creation and content to its reception and preservation. 

The call for papers deadline has passed (an archived version can be accessed here)

Please watch this space for more information about the conferencE

WSSXII is co-organized by the Women and Film History International Conference Committee (Drake Stutesman, Kristine Harris, Tami Williams, and Kate Saccone) and hosts Dominique Nasta (Université libre de Bruxelles & Belgian Royal Academy), Anke Brouwers (School of Arts/KASK HoGent), and Tom Paulus (University of Antwerp).

Frame enlargement, Sangue mineiro (1929), produced by and starring Carmen Santos.