The Women and the Silent Screen (WSS) Founders Travel Fund
The WSS Founders Travel Fund celebrates and honors the feminist film scholars who organized the first Women and the Silent Screen conference (as “Gender and Silent Cinema”) in 1999:
Annette Förster and Eva Warth
In recognition of their efforts to create a rich intellectual space to present work and foster feminist scholarship on silent cinema, the Women and Film History International steering committee will offer a modest travel grant and waived registration fees to someone presenting at a Women and the Silent Screen conference. The travel fund is designed to help graduate students and/or individuals without institutional support.
“When I was invited by Annette and Eva to participate in the Utrecht Gender and the Silent Cinema conference, I was an American graduate student who had recently discovered the joys we today take for granted: that potent centering of women in early cinema through feminism, archival research, silent film programs, and sheer doggedness. I found new materials, perspectives, and friends. I found I had a voice at a table. I guess I never left. ”
“I first saw Shoes in 1999 at the Gender and Silent Cinema conference organized by Eva Warth and Annette Förster in Utrecht. The groundbreaking event included presentations by scholars including Kay Sloan, Heide Schlüpmann, Alison McMahan, Vicki Callahan, Jane Gaines and myself, along with screenings of archival film prints. [...] I sat with two other American scholars, Kristen Whissel and Constance Balides, each of us at the beginning of our careers, all interested in feminist analysis of early cinema. And we were all absolutely stunned by Shoes.”
Please support this fund if you can. Your tax-deductible donation will to help carry the WSS founders’ vision and work forward!
Select “WSS Travel Fund” in the drop-down menu
Frame enlargement, Lois Weber’s Shoes (1916), Courtesy of Eye Filmmuseum.