The Humanities Institute at Stony Brook (HISB) is hosting a groundbreaking conference this September that will bring together scholars and filmmakers from around the world to investigate the politics, aesthetics and economics of women’s cinema, focusing on the ways this cinema engages contemporary scenarios of global change. “Global Women’s Cinema: Transnational Contexts, Cultural Difference and Gendered Scenarios,” will be held September 18 through September 20 at the Humanities Institute (Room 1008) and at the Hilton Garden Inn.
The conference is part of an international collaboration that began with the inaugural conference in May 2013 at the Università degli Studi Tre in Rome.
“With our counterparts at the University of Rome, we are further developing a project to investigate the politics and forms of contemporary global women’s cinema from 1990 to the present,” said E. Ann Kaplan, Distinguished Professor of English and Cultural Analysis and Theory, also past director of the HISB and past president, The Society for Cinema and Media Studies, who helped organize the Rome conference. “The participants — from Argentina, Australia, Canada, China, Germany, Greece, India, Iran, Italy, New Zealand, South Korea, Turkey and the United States — will continue to discuss the group’s ongoing research on the multifarious ways in which women’s cinema engages the contemporary scenarios of global change.”
The HISB conference is a follow-up event, organized by Kaplan with her colleagues, Adrián Pérez-Melgosa and Kathleen Vernon, both professors in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature. “This is a unique opportunity to see and hear about essential international films that are rarely shown in main-stream theaters and media outlets,” said Professor Pérez-Melgosa.
The conference features three keynote lectures by local distinguished film scholars Richard Allen, Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, and Jane Gaines, School of the Arts, Columbia University, along with Debra Zimmerman, director of the international distribution company Women Make Movies. Three international female directors will be at the conference to showcase and discuss their films — Negar Azarbayjani and Niki Karimi from Iran and Vivian Qu from China. Other participants include Melis Behlil, Enrico Carocci, Ilaria De Pescalis, Eliza Anna Delveroudi, Uta Felten, Somayeh Ghazizadeh, Sangita Gopal, Luz Horne, Antonia Lant, Neepa Majumdar, Rosanna Maule, Veronica Pravadelli, Hilary Radner, Ayako Saito, Ghazal Shakeri Shemirani, Maria Anita Stefanelli, Fereshteh Taerpour, E.K. Tan, Lingzhen Wang and Patricia White.
Film screenings, with a colloquium with the film directors, will be held each evening in the Charles B. Wang Center Theater:
September 18, 7 pm, Facing Mirrors, Negar Azarbayjani, Iran
September 19, 7 pm, Trap Street, Vivian Qu, China
September 20, 5 pm, Final Whistle, Niki Karimi, Iran
“We envisage developing this work through future conferences in other nations, such as Canada (Concordia University), Turkey (Kadir Has University) and Argentina (Universidad de San Andrés),” said Kaplan.
The event is co-sponsored by The Provost’s Office, College of Arts and Sciences, and the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature.
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