The Hollywood Conference was founded in 2024 by a group of scholars working broadly in the study of Hollywood. The goal of the conference is to regularly gather historians, media industries scholars, cultural theorists, comparative media studies scholars, feminist, queer, and Black studies scholars, television scholars, etc., all with an interest in critically engaging with the practices and products of the American motion picture and television industry, known for a century by the metonymic name ‘Hollywood.’

The inaugural Hollywood Conference will take place in July 2025 at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts, founded by Hollywood notables almost a century earlier. This first conference is sponsored by the Division of Cinema and Media Studies’ graduate student journal Spectator.

The goal is to make the Hollywood Conference a biennial event. Future iterations may rotate to other Los Angeles area campuses and will have focusing themes, while broadly centering on scholarship about Hollywood.