In the Shadow of The Birth of Nation: A Centennial Assessment of Griffith's Film
Commonwealth Fund Conference on American History
University College London
Thursday, 25 June - Saturday, 27 June 2015
The conference is sponsored by the Commonwealth Fund (under the auspices of UCL
History), partnered with the UCL Institute of the Americas, the Eccles Centre for
American Studies at the British Library, the Equiano Centre at UCL and SERCIA.
2 Programme
Thursday, 25 June
13.00-13.30
Registration (Darwin Building basement)
(Tea and coffee available in Darwin B05)
13.30-14.45
Welcome: Melvyn Stokes and Iwan Morgan (Darwin Lecture Theatre)
Keynote Lecture 1:
(Darwin Lecture Theatre)
Jane Gaines (Columbia University)
Find'
'The Birth of a Nation Footage We Don't Want to
Chair: Stephen Conway, Head of History Department, UCL
14.50-16.35 Panels
Panel 1:
'Black'-faces/bodies
Richard Maltby (Flinders University)
The Birth of a Nation'
Agata Frymus (University of York)
(Darwin Lecture Theatre)
'Blackface, disguise and invisibility in the reception of
'The Tradition of Blackface and The Birth of a Nation'
Elizabeth Sanderson (Trinity College, Illinois)
Bamboozled as Historical Intervention'
'Alternative Historiographies: Spike Lee's
Elizabeth Mullen (University of Western Brittany) 'Griffith's Grotesque Bodies: Miscegenation
and White Masculine Malaise in The Birth of a Nation'
Chair: Richard Maltby
Panel 2:
Griffith's 'Big Scenes'/Overseas influence (Darwin B15)
David Mayer (University of Manchester) 'The Battle of Petersburg: Griffith's "big scenes"'
Gilles Menegaldo (University of Poitiers) Natural Landscape Scenes in The Birth of a Nation:
Utopia, Conflict, Drama
Jacqueline Maingard (University of Bristol) 'Race, Nation, Identity: The Birth of a Nation
(1915) and epic film production in South Africa 1916-1918'
Melvyn Stokes (University College London) '"Black Horror on the Rhine": D. W. Griffith's
The Birth of a Nation and the French-occupied Rhineland after World War I'
Chair: Jacqueline Maingard
The conference is organised in collaboration with the British Film Institute to coincide
with a screening of The Birth of a Nation on Thursday 25 June at 19.30 in National
Film Theatre (NFT)1. This will be preceded at 18.00 by a roundtable discussion of the
film and its aftermath, also at NFT1. The roundtable will bring together all the
keynote speakers at the conference. Once the roundtable is over, the opening
reception for the conference will be in the Drawing Room at BFI Southbank (in the
same building as NFT1) beginning at 19.15.
3 Friday, 26 June
9.30-10.30
Coffee/tea (Darwin B05)
10.30-12.15
Panels
Panel 3:
Reception: U.S. and Abroad
(Darwin Lecture Theatre)
Nicholas Forster (Yale University) '"Provocative of Serious Public Disorder": Legislation,
Community, and the Screening of Birth of a Nation in New Haven, Connecticut'
Matthew H. Bernstein (Emory University) 'The Birth of a Nation in Atlanta'
Michael Hammond (University of Southampton) '…one of the most romantic and one of the
most instructive episodes in history': The Reception of The Birth of a Nation in Britain, 1915-16
Brian Willan (Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa) 'Sol T. Plaatje and Birth of a
Nation: opposing the "cinematographic calamity" in three continents'
Chair: Michael Hammond
Panel 4:
Representing 'blackness' (Darwin B15)
Corin Willis (Liverpool John Moores University) 'Sowing the seed of racism: the hidden
significance of D. W. Griffith's direction of African American actors in The Birth of a Nation
(1915)'
Penny Starfield (University of Caen)
The Birth of a Nation'
'Seen and not heard: intertextualities of sight and touch in
Martin Barker (Aberystwyth University) 'A Racism of Kinds: The Birth of a Nation and Last of
the Mohicans'
Lee Broughton (University of Leeds)
'Redrawing the Nation: evaluating the
representation of African American characters in Hollywood's Civil War and Southern states-set
Westerns from the civil rights and Black Power eras'
Chair: Corin Willis
12.15-13.30
Lunch (Darwin B05)
13.30-14.45
Keynote lecture 3:
(Darwin Lecture Theatre)
Linda Williams (University of California-Berkeley)
Comic and Melodramatic Modes of Blackface'
'In the Shadow of Birth of a Nation:
Chair: Christine Gledhill
14.50-16.35
Panel 5:
Panels
Varieties of resistance
(Darwin Lecture Theatre)
Allyson Nadia Field (UCLA) 'Fixing The Birth of a Nation: Hampton Institute, The New Era,
and the Ambiguities of Uplift'
Van Dora Williams (Hampton University)
Cara Caddoo (Indiana University)
determination'
'Norfolk and The Birth of a Nation'
'Birth of a Nation, Civil Rights, and Visual Self-
4 Jenny Woodley (Nottingham Trent University) 'The Meaning of Emancipation: African
American Commentaries, Memory and The Birth of a Nation'
Chair: Cara Caddoo
Panel 6:
Contesting Thomas Dixon/White 'nationhood' (Darwin B15)
Charlene Regester (University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill) 'Thomas Dixon Re-imagined in
The Birth of a Nation-A Film Whose Aftermath Continually Invited Opposition in the African
American Press'
Peggy Brooks-Bertram (University of Buffalo) and John Mark Rhea 'One Hundred Years Lost:
An African American Elegy Contesting The Birth of a Nation: Drusilla Dunjee Houston and
Spirit of the South: The Maddened Mob'
Bridget Bennett (University of Leeds)
Birth of a Nation'
'Contesting White Nationhood: Writing Home after The
Annemarie Kane (University of Winchester) 'The Birth (and Death?) of a White Atlantic: The
transatlantic circulation of whiteness in popular cinema from Griffith to Tarantino'
Chair: Charlene Regester
16.35-17.05 Tea/coffee break
17.15-18.30
(B05)
Keynote Lecture 4:
(Darwin Lecture Theatre)
Cedric Robinson (University of California-Santa Barbara)
and His Successors’
‘ Dismembering History: Griffith
Chair: Iwan Morgan
18.30-20.00
Reception (The Garden Room, Wilkins Building)
20.00 Conference dinner
Saturday, 27 June
09.00-10.15
Keynote lecture 5:
Paul McEwan (Muhlenberg College)
American History to Film History'
(Darwin Lecture Theatre)
'The Birth of a Nation in Mid-Century: From
Chair: Matthew Bernstein
10.20-12.05
Panels
Panel 7:
Music, War, Culture
(Darwin Lecture Theatre)
Martin Marks (MIT)
'History Unwritten in Lightening? Why and how the 1915 score for
Birth of a Nation should be published'
Frank Mehring (University of Nijmegen) 'The Transnational Soundtrack of War and
Liberation: Remediating Birth of a Nation from Joseph Carl Breil to D J Spooky'
Mariah L. Hepworth (Northwestern University) 'The General of "Shadowland Warfare": D.
W. Griffith and the Birth of the American War Film'
5 Jonathan Ward (University of East Anglia)
'Imagine that, propaganda got the people
confused/Damned by the media that keep 'em subdued': The cultural response to D. W. Griffith's
The Birth of a Nation in Paul Miller's The Rebirth of a Nation'
Chair: Martin Marks
Panel 8:
Melodrama/History
(Darwin B15)
Dennis Rohatyn (University of San Diego)
'Saving Mr. Griffith'
Anne-Marie Paquet-Deyris (University of Paris West Nanterre) 'Birth of a Nation's "melodrama
of pathos and action": a tale of national rebirth?'
Beata Zawadka (Szczecin University, Poland)
D. W. Griffith's Filmic Oeuvre'
Jenny Barrett (Edge Hill University)
Pedagogy'
'In/Tolerance? Giving Justice to the In/Justice of
'Screening The Birth of a Nation and Issues of
Chair: Jenny Barrett
12.10-13.25
Concluding keynote lecture:
Robert Lang (University of Hartford)
National Trauma'
(Darwin Lecture Theatre)
'"Still a North and a South": The Birth of a Nation and
Chair: Lee Broughton
13.25 Lunch and concluding drinks (Darwin B05)