World Cinema in Theory
Description
The idea of world cinema has always been slippery. First cohering as an umbrella term for films made outside Hollywood and western Europe, the concept significantly evolved in the early 2000s, as postcolonialism and globalization prompted attention to the transnational circuits of (forced) migration and global capital and a rethinking of the national frameworks that had previously dominated cinema studies. This reassessment moved away from the negative, binary logic that characterized the first articulations of world cinema and the Eurocentrism implicit in this approach. Instead, the second phase embraced a positive, polycentric methodology that looked to decenter the field, a shift perhaps best encompassed in Luçia Nagib’s conceptualization of world cinema as method. At the same time, scholars employed related terms to account for the transnational modes of production, distribution, exhibition, and consumption that were beginning to dominate some sectors of the industry. Since then, world cinema has become increasingly institutionalized both inside and outside the academy, with the emergence of multiple edited collections, journal special issues, and book series, as well as the launch of film festivals, DVD imprints, social media channels, and streaming platforms dedicated to it.
Thus, despite the ambiguity of its referent and, for some scholars, increasing skepticism about its critical value, the concept of world cinema is, as Dudley Andrew reminds us, “now permanently with us: in our classes, our textbooks, the popular press.” Such persistence, even in the face of disagreement over its meaning and usefulness, speaks to the fundamentally international foundations of cinema and a persistent drive to unpack the evolving global dynamics of the medium.
Taking the conjoined ubiquity and instability of world cinema as its starting point, this seminar builds on this history by reinterrogating the concept and tracking its shifting utility in light of more recent geopolitical and industrial changes. As such, it seeks papers that explore how earlier understandings of world cinema need to be rethought with regards to the complex political, economic, technological, ecological, social, industrial, and educational transformations of the last twenty years. In addition, it invites new theorizations of world cinema that expand, complicate, or disrupt existing paradigms and/or offer fresh takes on how we can understand the concept of world cinema today.
Participants are asked to develop their papers around a key word that signifies their approach to understanding what world cinema is/could be, with each paper framed as a riff on the idea of “World Cinema as ...”. The seminar is open to papers that employ a wide variety of methodologies (industry studies, digital humanities, textual analysis etc.) and theoretical frameworks (marxist, postcolonial, queer, ecocritical etc.). Innovative and provocative theorizations are particularly welcome.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Upasana Dutta teaches at Fairfield University, and she is a literary and cultural studies scholar specializing in postcolonial studies, global anglophone literatures, and food studies.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Tomas Elliott Assistant Professor in English at Northeastern University London. His research focuses on transmedia adaptation and world cinema, and has been published in Adaptation, Humanities, and Classical Receptions Journal. His co-translation of The Limit of the Useful was published in 2023.
Speaker Bio
Stephen Woo is Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies at Marist College and a 2024–25 Critical Studies Fellow in the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art. His research has been published or is forthcoming in the Journal for Cinema and Media Studies, New Literary History, and Camera Obscura: Feminism,Culture, and Media Studies.
Speaker Bio
Lisa Patti is Associate Professor of Media and Society at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. Her research focuses on global media, multilingualism, and translation; contemporary media distribution; and media studies pedagogy. She is the editor of Writing About Screen Media (Routledge, 2019; 2nd edition 2026); co-editor of The Multilingual Screen: New Reflections on Cinema and Linguistic Difference (Bloomsbury, 2016); and co-author of Film Studies: A Global Introduction (Routledge, 2015).
Papers
Speaker Bio
Sarah Hamblin is Associate Professor of Cinema Studies at UMass Boston. Her research focuses on global art cinema and graphic literatures, emphasizing the relationships between aesthetics, affect, and radical politics. Her work has appeared in October, JCMS, Cultural Politics, and Black Camera, and she has edited special issues on the legacies of '68, radical documentary, and Blade Runner. She is currently completing a manuscript on global art cinema and revolutionary politics in the long 1960s.
Speaker Bio
Elena Razlogova is an Associate Professor of History at Concordia University in Montreal. She is the author of _The Listener’s Voice: Early Radio and the American Public_ (2011) as well as articles and chapters on global cinema circulation in the Cold War era, including festival circuits for African cinema; Global South film festival diplomacy; simultaneous film translation; and Soviet international film festivals.
Speaker Bio
Mazyar Mahan is a Teaching Associate and Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Texas at Dallas, where he teaches courses on transnational cinema and global art cinema. His academic work has appeared in Mise-en-scène, The Spectator, and the Palgrave Handbook of Arab Film and Media. Mazyar is also one of the editors of the forthcoming volume ReFocus: The Films of Shirin Neshat, which will be published by Edinburgh University Press in 2026.
Speaker Bio
José Miguel Palacios is Assistant Professor in the Department of Cinematic Arts at California State University Long Beach. He is the author of Transnational Cinema Solidarity: Chilean Exile Film & Video after 1973 (UC Press, 2025) and of various articles published in journals like Film Quarterly, Screen, The Moving Image, and Jump Cut. He is currently working on a second book devoted to the archives of exile filmmaker Raúl Ruiz, which was awarded a Project Development Grant by ACLS.