Call for Papers

ESPRit Postgraduate Workshop on Periodical Studies

12th International ESPRit Conference (Urbino, 2024)

11 September 2024

Università degli Studi di Urbino Carlo Bo
Deadline for the applications: 8 March 2024

In conjunction with the 12th ESPRit Conference “Periodicals: S.T.E.A.M. Ahead!”, a postgraduate workshop will be held on 11th September.

The workshop is open to postgraduate students working on any topic pertaining to periodicals from any historical period, geographical origin, and cultural context.

Candidates should provide four documents:

1. An academic CV showing your studies, interests, and possible distinctions and/or
2. A 500-word formal proposal for the Case studies are to be avoided. In order for the Workshop to be useful to all participants, the proposal should focus on specific methodological points pertaining to periodical studies. Workshop presentations last generally 10 minutes.
3. A statement of how the proposal relates to periodical studies. If this area of study is as yet unfamiliar, please say so.
4. An outline of your on-going research or PhD thesis a one page long (in the latter case: title, supervisor, affiliation, year of forthcoming PhD or recently finished PhD).

To apply, please send the documents to the organisers (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., with subject: “ESPRit Postgraduate Workshop on Periodical Studies”), no later than 30 March 2024. The main working language of the conference is English, but proposals for papers in other languages will be taken into consideration as long as they are presented according to instructions agreed upon with the organizers. We look forward to welcoming you to Urbino!

Selecting Committee:

Laurel Brake, Birkbeck, University of London
Carlotta Castellani, Università degli Studi di Urbino Carlo Bo
Fabio Guidali, Università degli Studi di Milano
Evanghelia Stead, Université Paris-Saclay

Date: 27 October 2023

Venue: Institute for Literature and Art, Belgrade

We cordially invite you to the conference "Between Distant and Close Reading – Periodical Studies and Humanities in the 21st Century," which will be held at the Library of the Institute for Literature and Art in Belgrade. The conference program will be live streamed via the Institute's Facebook page.

This event is a collaborative initiative of the Department of Periodicals in the History of Serbian Literature and Culture (Institute for Literature and Art) and the IuPS Research Group on Periodical Studies (IULM University of Milan).

The primary objective of this conference is to bring together researchers in the field of periodical studies to explore the empirical, theoretical, and methodological insights that periodical studies offer in the teaching and studying of humanities in the 21st century. What is more, one of the essential questions to debate is how periodical studies shape our presuppositions of what teaching and / or studying humanities should look like.

Key Themes of the Conference include:

· Methodologies of Reading Periodicals: Challenging critical paradigms in both historical and contemporary contexts.

· Reader Response Criticism in the Periodical Press: Examining the process of (re)constructing the audience and its impact on microsociology and cultural history.

· Periodical Studies' Insights: Exploring how periodical studies transform disciplines and fields within the humanities.

For detailed information about the conference program and the book of abstracts, please visit [https://www.ikum.org.rs/news.php?id=358].

We look forward to your participation!

Time and Venue: 11-13 September, 2024, Università degli Studi di Urbino Carlo Bo, Urbino, Italy.

In 2024 the European Society for Periodical Research (ESPRit) will convene its Twelfth International Conference in Urbino, Italy, to focus on the theme of PERIODICALS: S.T.E.A.M. AHEAD!

In periodicals, the fields of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (“S.T.E.M.”) and the Arts are imbricated with one another (“S.T.E.A.M.”) in both material and theoretical terms. The history of journals and magazines runs parallel to the industrial and scientific revolutions. These revolutions have found a privileged place of diffusion in periodicals thanks to the timeliness of information, flexibility of content, easy diffusion and prompt response to the dialogues and controversies reflected within them. Technological progress has shaped the materiality of periodicals, including the type of paper, graphic design and technologies for the reproduction of both text and images.

One of the aims of the conference is to reflect on how periodicals popularized and transformed the new technologies, visual culture, and scientific discoveries within a context of permanent change in the models of cultural and social organization, with special attention given to the role that images and texts played in the diffusion of scientific ideas and the presentation of technological innovations. We also invite reflection on the role of periodicals in the development of disciplines: we are interested in how periodicals both establish and collapse borders between the humanities, arts, technologies, and the sciences. For example, we welcome contributions from a historical, modernist or decolonial perspective, as well as with a focus on recent challenges posed by the rise of digitization, open access publishing, and Artificial Intelligence.

We invite scholars from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives to reflect on how periodicals represent, create, maintain, or challenge, the notions of “techniques”, “sciences”, and “art” within the contexts of their localities, their communities of production, their readerships, and their editorial boards.

Proposals may focus on, but are not limited to, the following topics:

• Technological developments and reproduction techniques in periodicals – graphic design, typography and photomechanical printing of the press – and their impact on the dissemination of knowledge
• The effect of dominant discourses on “science”, “technology”, and “progress” in relation to artistic contexts and literary debates in the periodical press
• The role of the press in the transfer of cultural concepts into the domain of science and technology and vice versa
• Scientific visual sources in art magazines and vice versa
• The role of illustrated periodicals in spreading scientific knowledge
• Periodical design and typography in different types of magazines (scientific, medical, artistic, cultural, political, etc.)
• Scientific discoveries and the popular press
• Science, technology, and serial fiction: utopias and dystopias
• The representation of the machine in the press and its relationship with the artistic and cultural context
• Periodical Studies and theoretical reflections on shifting conceptual paradigms (i.e. “organicist” vs “mechanist” worldviews)
• The role of periodicals in canonizing and theorizing about concepts of “renewal”, “revolution”, and “tradition” in the light of technological and scientific revolutions
• The role of periodicals in the technologization of modern life, as well as social and cultural processes (i.e. the rise of digitization, open access, and Artificial Intelligence).

The working language of the conference is English. Papers in languages other than English should be accompanied by a PowerPoint presentation with salient information in English. We welcome proposals from researchers at all stages of their careers. Proposals of around 250 words (references not included) for 20-minute papers and a short CV (no more than 200 words) should be sent to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. by 29 February 2024.

We also encourage proposals for joint panels of three papers and proposals for 90-minute roundtables with up to 5 discussants that center on exchange and broader discussion. Please include a brief rationale for the panel along with an abstract and CV for each presenter. Updates can be found on the 12th ESPRit Conference website, forthcoming.

Scientific Committee:

Carlotta Castellani (Università degli Studi di Urbino Carlo Bo), Contact person
Oliver A. I. Botar (University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada)
Caterina Caputo (Università degli studi di Venezia "IUAV")
Gábor Dobó (Kassák Museum, Budapest)
Giovanna Perini Folesani (Università degli Studi di Urbino Carlo Bo)
Venanzio Raspa (Università degli Studi di Urbino Carlo Bo)
Salvatore Ritrovato (Università degli Studi di Urbino Carlo Bo)
Isabel Wünsche (Constructor University, Bremen)

ESPRit ‘Periodicals and the Law’ Network (P&LN) online seminar series

This seminar series will initially be organised during the 2023-2024 academic year by Aled Jones and Gioula Koutsopanagou, supported by a sub-group comprising Mara Logaldo and Nora Ramtke. Its purpose is to create a network for the creation of collaborative, transnational and comparative work on press regulation and press practices in print and visual material in and across different national contexts with respect to the law, and to the law-related professions of journalists, lawyers, lawmakers. and legal periodicals. Subjects may include: IP and copyright in the context of the notion of protected work, such as printed and visual material (photographs and artworks), moral rights (appropriation art, remixes), ownership (authors and editors, printed matter, photographers, reporters), exceptions and limitations (fair use), infringements, Creative Commons license, civil law protection (rights of privacy, right of publicity, personal data protection), fiscal policies, libel legislation, obscenity laws, state censorship, court injunctions, and state security restrictions (e.g. for national defence in wartime). The field also includes studies of the persecution and prosecution of reporters, editors, writers and publishers, legal restrictions on ownership (e.g. anti-Trust, anti-monopoly laws), media laws covering advertising, laws covering reporter access (e.g. the UK Lobby system), or geographic areas/militarised zones of restricted access, and war reporting. It is envisaged that work undertaken by researchers in their own institutions or individually, based on local/national collections, with an interdisciplinary approach, may then be considered in a broader, multinational context. The online seminars will each last one hour and will consist of two papers of 15 minutes each, followed by discussion.

Seminar 1: 17 November 2023, 3pm CET (chair: Nora Ramtke)

JELENA LALATOVIĆ (Institute for Literature and Art, Belgrade): “Campaigning Against State Repression in the Periodical Press: Censorship and Resistance in the Yugoslav Context (1928˗1938)”

In 1928 a prominent Yugoslav writer August Cesarec issued a newspaper The Protection of a Human: an Independent Herald for Human and Civil Rights aimed at campaigning against the Law for the protection of the state, whose main goal was to curb free speech and freedom of expression in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. The newspaper The Protection of a Human thus represents the first periodical of this genre (entirely dedicated to a single cause) in the history of Yugoslav periodicals. Additionally, it established a specific rhetoric of defending the position of the free press, specifically in the genre of reporting. The aim of the research is twofold. Firstly, I would like to explore how the left-wing periodical press of the thirties, which were succumbed to severe censorship and persecution by the authorities, inherited and developed the strategies and tactics set as an example by Cesarec’s newspaper. Along with that, I would like to elaborate on whether this analysis allows us to outline a new classification of these periodicals on the basis that they cherished a specific meta-dimension embodied in their rhetoric and editorial underpinnings – deliberation on the position of the press in an authoritarian society. In other words, I use the Yugoslav context as a case study to examine how the legal framework (including the pretexts such as a libel or offense to restrain the freedom of expression) influenced the typology and morphology of the socially and politically engaged periodicals. The methodology I use relies on a comparative reading of the rhetoric and practice of censorship, which includes an examination of the archival documents of the Central Press Bureau, and periodicals whose editorial policy was based on a systematic opposition to repression and censorship.

Jelena Lalatović is a Belgrade-based researcher. She obtained her PhD having defended a thesis entitled ‘The Genres of Literary Criticism and Polemic in the Student Periodical Press: the Oppositional Public Sphere from 1937 to 1968’ at the University of Belgrade. She is currently working on a monograph based on the doctoral research. Along with Dr Dario Boemia she has been organizing a conference ‘Between Distant and Close Reading: Periodical Studies and Humanities in the 21st Century’. Her field of interest includes cultural and literary studies, as well as political and intellectual history, and its impact on literature. She works as a research assistant at the Institute for Literature and Art.

MICHAEL LÖRCH (Researcher and translator): “Decentralized Censorship in a Centralized State: The ‘Guidance and Control’ of Scholarly Periodicals in the German Democratic Republic”

The 1949 constitution of the German Democratic Republic boldly declared in its 9^th article that “There is no press censorship”. The country’s second constitution of 1968 avoided the taboo word of ‘censorship’ altogether, declaring instead that the “Freedom of the press, radio and television is guaranteed”. Consequently, there would never be any official law or regulatory text detailing the practice of censorship taking place in the East German state. Instead, the heavily centralized country relied on a decentralized system of ‘control and guidance’, transferring much of the responsibility on individual editors, authors, and other media professionals. Those, however, could, for most of the time, not rely on any document and instead had to anticipate what Party officials deemed printable, creating an atmosphere of mistrust and uncertainty. The practice of censorship therefore took place in a legal grey area, with State and Party relying on the use of euphemisms such as ‘guidance’, ‘control’ and ‘support, framing acts of censorship as sponsorship or the result of economic shortages. Much of the censorship therefore occurred in the form of pre- and self-censorship. The lack of a written law nonetheless created some leeway that resourceful editors and authors could carefully exploit. While these mechanisms have been subject of scholarly interest regarding the country’s book, newspaper and film production, the effect on periodicals has so far been neglected. This paper will therefore illustrate the ‘guidance and control’ exerted on even the most peripheral periodicals by looking at the Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik (1953-present), a scholarly journal of the humanities. Based on the journal and archival material, I will explore how the journal’s editors navigated this system of censorship without a censorship authority and how it influenced the journal and its contents. I will equally investigate how the journal participated in a wider movement, involving various forms of published and unpublished material, to widen the country’s literary canon and academic horizon, for which the ZAA’s international visibility and the very form of the scholarly journal provided opportunities and justifications.

Michael Lörch is a researcher and translator based in Strasbourg, France. He recently finished his PhD thesis under the title of The Politics of the Scholarly Journal: The Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik (ZAA) as a Link between Academia, Publishing Industry and Politics. He is currently working on a monograph based on the doctoral research and an article on the Anglophone Press in 19^th-century Germany. He worked as research assistant at the Germersheim Campus of the Johannes-Gutenberg University Mainz. His fields of interest include periodical studies and the role of politics and economics in modern and contemporary North American literature.

Seminar 2: 19 December 2023, 6pm CET (chair: Aled Jones)

ANDREW KING (University of Greenwich): ‘Beyond the Taxes on Knowledge: the Law and the 1860s English Press’

Summed up in Carlyle’s famous notion of the press as “the Fourth Estate”, discussions of the Law and the British press in the nineteenth century have often been framed in gendered terms of a heroic struggle for freedom from government where opposition to the so-called “Taxes on Knowledge” from the 1830s to 50s has been a focal point. However, regulation of the press is conceptually much more complex than one issue or slogan (however effective such a unifying slogan can be). The laws concerning the press are many and varied, involving diverse actants in a multitude of conflicts on small and large scales: government and legislature (not always identical); owners and managers (again, maybe with different and conflicting aims); workers of many different kinds in manufacturing and distribution; consumers. I shall briefly relate a few case studies concerning some of the remaining legal regulations of the press in the 1860s after the last of the “Taxes on Knowledge” had been repealed in 1861, legal regulations concerning obscenity, libel, copyright, and – very often forgotten altogether – the labour conditions of both printers and distributors.

Andrew King is Professor of English at the University of Greenwich, London. He was the founding editor of Victorian Popular Fictions and is the author or editor of 8 books and many articles on the nineteenth-century press and popular fiction, most recently Work and the Nineteenth-Century Press (2022). He's currently working on a chapter on the global economics of the periodical and a 4-volume collection of annotated primary sources with Marysa Demoor, Andrew Hobbs and Lisa Peters on Geographies of the Press. This seminar paper comes out of a chapter he's written for a volume on the 1860s edited by Pamela Gilbert coming out from CUP in 2024.

ANN HALE (British and Irish Legal Information Institute): ‘Business Matters: Examining Legal Frameworks Underpinning the Periodical Press’

The legal structures underpinning the business entities that make up the periodical press receive little scholarly attention, yet every entity associated with the press takes a particular legal form, and forms can change over time. Reading across single or multiple enterprises can reconceptualize how the press was organized and who participated in it. This presentation suggests an approach for examining legal frameworks and provides an overview of key subjects to keep in mind. Inspired by Linda K. Hughes’s “sideways” approach to print culture, it reads across multiple enterprises, legal entities, and intersecting networks linked to George Newnes (1851–1910), the publisher of influential general-audience periodicals such as Tit-Bits (1881–1985), a penny weekly, and the Strand Magazine (1891–1950), an illustrated monthly. While the example entities are rooted in the common law, Britain, and the 1890s, the approach and underlying concepts are broadly applicable to other jurisdictions and entities. 

Ann M. Hale is an independent scholar and the Executive Director of the British and Irish Legal Information Institute (BAILII). She completed her PhD at the University of Greenwich in 2020, and her thesis, “Business Matters: Legal Structures, Roles, People, and Places in the Nineteenth-Century Press—A Case Study of George Newnes Limited,” was awarded RSVP’s inaugural 2021 Sally Mitchell Dissertation Prize.

Seminar 3: 24 April 2024, 17:00 CET (Chair: Andrew King)  

WILL SLAUTER (Sorbonne Université): “Periodicals and the Right to Copy: Copyright Exceptions for the Press Before and After the Berne Convention (1886)”

This presentation will explore the history of copyright exceptions for the periodical press in the decades immediately before and after the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works (1886 and subsequent revisions). Comparing national legislation in several European countries and early bi-national copyright treaties as well as the various revisions of the Berne Convention, it will draw attention to contemporary debates about the appropriate rules for the reproduction and translation of contributions to newspapers and other periodicals. Although the history of copyright is most commonly framed as a narrative of expansion over time, the history presented here stresses how in specific national and international contexts there were successful efforts to carve out an explicit right to copy articles from newspapers and other periodicals. Although the broad rights to reproduce material from periodicals found in some of the national statutes and the initial Berne Convention were restricted over time, the history presented here shows how attitudes and practices related to periodical works helped nudge copyright law in specific directions at key moments in its history.

Will Slauter is a professor in the English department at Sorbonne Université, where he teaches primarily United States history. His publications include the monograph Who Owns the News? A History of Copyright (Stanford, 2019), a special issue of Victorian Periodicals Review on copyright and the 19th-century British press (Winter 2018), and the open-access volume Circulation and Control: Artistic Culture and Intellectual Property in the Nineteenth Century, co-edited with Marie-Stéphanie Delamaire (Open Book Publishers, 2021).

Seminar 4: 28 May 2024, 17:00 CET (Chair: Elena Ogliari) 

ELENA LAGOUDI (Museologist/Data curator, National Documentation Centre, Athens, Greece): ‘Cultural Data in the AI Age: navigating the intersection of cultural datasets, civic value, and AI’

The National Documentation Centre (EKT) in Greece, through SearchCulture.gr, the Greek national aggregator for cultural data, plays a pivotal role in widening public access to cultural data in Greece and beyond. This paper will present SearchCulture's content, innovative business model and digital curation methodology which is oriented towards adding social value to cultural data produced through public funding. It will discuss cultural datasets, with a focus on Periodicals, and how AI can revolutionize cultural documentation. It will delve into the benefits of using AI throughout the data lifecycle, from preservation to analysis, highlighting its potential for enhancing understanding and representation of the past.

Elena Lagoudi is a museologist with a focus on data curation, collections management and digital content strategy. Having worked for a decade in national museums in the UK (TATE, The National Gallery) she developed digital products, services, and strategy. Since 2012 she has been working for the National Documentation Centre in Athens, Greece, as part of the team that develops the National Cultural Heritage Aggregator, SearchCulture.gr.

 EVANGELIA VAGENA (Attorney at Law, Ph.D.): "AI, Copyright Law in print and visual media'

We will examine the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and copyright law, with a focus on its implications within the realms of academic journals, legal literature and images' use within. We will focus on AI's role in content creation, curation, and dissemination which has significantly transformed scholarly publishing and legal documentation processes, as well as in the rights’ management process. AI evolution presents multifaceted copyright challenges concerning ownership, infringement, and the application of copyright exceptions, both in AI's input and output. In light of the first EU AI Act, we will examine the main questions posed and the responses provided by current copyright legislation, as well as those addressed by emerging AI-specific laws. Additionally, we will underscore the importance of interdisciplinary dialogue among the legal community, technologists, and policymakers.

Evangelia Vagena is a lawyer specializing in IT law with a focus on copyright law, personal data and cybersecurity. Currently, she serves as the Senior Director of Compliance for the Orfium Group of Companies. From 2019 to 2022, she held the position of Director at the Hellenic Copyright Organisation (HCO), where she had previously worked as a lawyer for 13 years. She earned her PhD from the Athens School of Law, focusing on copyright technological protection and digital rights management. Additionally, she holds a Master's degree in Law and Information Technology from the University of Montpellier I in France. Evangelia is also an adjunct lecturer of Information Law at the Athens University of Economics and Business and a lecturer on contract at the University of Piraeus.

These seminars will be held online. Please register below in order to receive the Zoom link for the sessions.