Institute for Germanic & Romance Studies, University of London

26-28 June 2008

Key note speakers: Francesco Casetti , Mikhail Iampolski, Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Soyoung Kim.

The conference has been designed to engage specifically with intellectual fields that concern both the IGRS and the SSG through an examination of the geographical and intellectual origins of film theory and its global diffusion. The conference will trace the contexts in which film theory was first articulated (between disciplines, national borders and in a close relation to the politics of modernity) in some European countries during the early twentieth century. The conference will then trace some of the ways in which film theory traveled in key, non-European, cultural and political contexts during the second half of the twentieth century, particularly its new configurations, translations and its re-politicisation.

With gratitude for support received from the British Academy and the School of Advanced Studies.