Global Cinema Symposium: Rethinking Transnational Cinema(s)
Dallas, Texas
Organization: University of Texas at Dallas
Global Cinema Symposium: Rethinking Transnational Cinema(s)
Bass School of Arts, Humanities, and Technology
The University of Texas at Dallas
November 13-14, 2026
Keynote Speakers:
Professor Bliss Cua Lim, University of Toronto
Professor Katarzyna Marciniak, Occidental College
Call for Papers
From its inception, cinema has transcended borders through the movement of people, capital, narratives, and visual technology. However, over the past two decades, the term transnational cinema has evolved into one of the most influential and contested frameworks in film studies. Scholars such as Elizabeth Ezra, Terry Rowden, Deborah Shaw, Will Higbee, and Song Hwee Lim have variously expanded, critiqued, and redefined the concept, emphasizing its aesthetic, political, and industrial dimensions and prompting new questions about its theoretical and pedagogical implications. While these approaches have illuminated the circulation of films, filmmakers, and spectators across borders, they have also raised questions about the continuing relevance of the national cinema framework and the analytical boundaries of the transnational itself.
This symposium revisits the concept of transnational cinema at a moment when two distinct currents seem bound for collision. On the one hand, global migration, digital media, the global climate catastrophe, geopolitical conflicts, and transregional collaborations have blurred distinctions between the local and the global, as well as the national and the transnational. On the other hand, isolationism, authoritarianism, and protectionism have re-erected physical and ideological borders across the globe. Is the world more or less transnational as a result of these competing impulses?
In light of these pressing concerns, and following Deborah Shaw’s call for greater precision in defining the term, Ezra and Rowden’s theorization of transnational cinema as a response to globalization, and Higbee and Lim’s proposal for a critical transnationalism, we ask how the framework of the transnational continues to inform and illuminate contemporary film production, circulation, and scholarship.
We invite proposals that address theoretical, historical, or pedagogical questions, such as: How can the familiar concept of transnational cinema elucidate emergent and unfamiliar problems in the contemporary landscape? How do we define and teach transnational cinema now? Is transnational cinema best understood as a framework, an approach, a mode of filmmaking, or a category of world cinema? How does transnational cinema intersect with, or diverge from, national, world, and global cinema theories? What are the political, aesthetic, or ethical stakes of emphasizing transnationality in film studies today?
We welcome both theoretical interventions and case studies from diverse regions and traditions.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
• Theories and definitions of transnational cinema
• Pedagogical approaches to transnational cinema
• Feminist, queer, and trans approaches to transnational cinema
• Transnational authorship and stardom
• Memory, trauma, and postmemory in transnational film
• Digital technologies and virtual transnational spaces
• Streaming platforms and global distribution
• Cinemas of diaspora, exile, and migration
• Cross-border activism and solidarity through film
• Environmental and ecological transnationalism
• Film policy, censorship, and cultural diplomacy
• Transnational labor, precarity, and creative economies
• International film festivals and global circulation
• Archival and historiographical approaches to transnational film
• Politics of translation, dubbing, and subtitling
• Regional and transregional filmmaking practices
• Anti-colonial, postcolonial, and de-colonial aesthetics and narratives
• Global Hollywood and transnational co-productions
• Transnational spectatorship and global audiences
• State, statelessness, and belonging in transnational cinema
• Borders, border-crossings, and redefinitions of home
• Transnational genres
• De-Westernizing film studies
Presenters will be invited to submit completed papers for consideration in an edited collection or special issue developed from the symposium.
Proposals (250–300 words) and short bios (100 words) should be submitted by June 1st, 2026, using this Google Form: https://forms.gle/8mbYC8pY2BZJt6oQ9
For questions, please contact the organizing committee at ahtfilmstudies@utdallas.edu
Symposium Organizers, University of Texas at Dallas:
Shilyh Warren, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Film Studies
Mazyar Mahan, Ph.D. Candidate, Film Studies
https://filmstudies.utdallas.edu/
Mazyar Mahan