Straight to the Front Row: Investigating Contemporary Western Gay Male Cinema (University of Northampton)

Scholar-Activism in the Twenty-first Century British Library, London, 22-23 June 2018  The topic of scholar-activism has seen a recent resurgence in our contemporary political moment. To explore this topic, a transatlantic, scholar-activist conference will be held at the British Library on Friday June 22 and Saturday June 23. The conference will put scholars into conversation with activists to discuss how scholars and activists can work together, put recent social movements such as The Black Lives Matter Movement into scholarly and historical perspective, and highlight some ways in which scholars and activists in the US and UK are currently working together and engaging in efforts for social justice. The keynote speaker for the conference will be Professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, who will speak on “The Black Lives Matter movement in the Age of Trump.” Professor Heather Thompson, the winner of the 2017 Pulitzer prize, will also speak at the conference. We welcome […]

Hollywood and the Production Code: Criticism and History. Friday, 6th July 2018 @ King’s College London. (Symposium speaker and respondent: Professor Lea Jacobs, University of Wisconsin-Madison.) A one-day symposium devoted to the style-based investigation of the influence of the Production Code on Hollywood cinema. The symposium will take in a range of issues concerning the impact of the Code on “golden age” Hollywood filmmaking. Part of the symposium will also be devoted to a close consideration of the style of “pre-Code” filmmaking (generally understood as 1930-1934). There is currently a strong consensus, grounded in the detailed archival work of major film historians, that 30-34 was not, after all, “pre” the Code but was a period in which the Code played an important role in shaping the content of movie fictions. Yet film festivals and TV channels (TCM, for example) continue to find an audience for early-30s productions by signalling, via […]

Thursday 27 and Friday 28 September 2018 International conference Université Jean Monnet, Saint-Etienne (CELEC) The sixties and the seventies marked a turning-point in the evolution of family. Major sociocultural changes undermined certain patterns of gender roles around which traditional families, and the American society at large, were organized. When the Food and Drug Administration approved the first oral contraceptive back in 1960 and the Supreme Court ruled in favor of legal abortion in 1973 (Roe v. Wade), women were given the right to break free from the normative gendered imperatives of the traditional family. Because the cult of domesticity gradually declined, and the crisis imposed the necessity to move from single-income to dual-income families, an unprecedented number of women – wives and mothers included – joined the workforce in the seventies. This shift in social values combined with new legal developments in family law (California for instance adopted the no-fault […]