Session Title: Classical Hollywood 
Organiser: David John Boyd, Stirling Maxwell Centre, University of Glasgow
Submission Deadline: June 30, 2025
Conference Dates: November 20–23, 2025
Location: InterContinental San Francisco, San Francisco, CA
Submission Portal: pamla.ballastacademic.com/Home/S/19587

This session invites scholarly explorations into Classical Hollywood cinema (1917–1960). We seek papers addressing various facets of Hollywood’s Golden Age, including genre developments, star system analyses, auteur theory, technological innovations, literary adaptations, censorship and the Production Code, as well as critical interrogations of race, class, gender, and cultural representation. Engaging with the conference theme, “Palimpsests: Memory and Oblivion,” while not necessary, is welcome.

This session provides an opportunity for fresh scholarly insights into the Classical Hollywood era: a pivotal period that shaped film history and continues to influence cinematic storytelling globally. Classical Hollywood cinema not only established enduring genre conventions, stylistic modes, and narrative techniques but also solidified the star system and popularized cinema as a mass medium.

Papers are encouraged on topics that engage critically with various aspects of Classical Hollywood such as:

-genre formation and evolution, from film noir and comic musicals to Westerns and melodramas

-studies on the star system could analyze how celebrity personas from Greta Garbo and Katharine Hepburn to Cary Grant and Humphrey Bogart influenced cultural identity, performance and cinematic storytelling

-auteur theory may revisit signature filmmakers like Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Orson Welles and many others assessing their artistic signatures within studio constraints

--Hollywood’s adaptations of literary works, exploring how classic novels and plays were transformed on screen, often reflecting and shaping contemporary social attitudes

-consideration of technological and stylistic innovations -- such as sound, color, widescreen, and cinematography -- will shed light on how Hollywood continually reinvented its visual and narrative language

- Classical Hollywood’s social, political, and cultural representations, examining how gender roles, racial identities, class distinctions, and ideologies were constructed, reinforced, or contested in films of the period

-discussions of the Production Code and censorship practices provide another critical avenue to explore how filmmakers creatively navigated institutional constraints, like the transgressive films of emigre auteurs like Fritz Lang, Ernst Lubitsch, Joseph von Sternberg, Billy Wilder and Max Ophüls

This session invites interdisciplinary contributions from scholars in film and media studies, literature, cultural history, gender studies, critical theory, and film-philosophy, emphasizing the significance of Classical Hollywood cinema as a critical lens for reflecting upon our present moment, which reflects many of the social, political and economic concerns of Classical Hollywood.