The history of ESPRit began in conversation. A panel on periodical methodology at the European Society for the Study of English conference in Aarhus in 2008 brought together Usha Wilbers, Odin Dekkers, Peter Buse and Antony Rowland. What emerged from that meeting was not simply a network, but a shared spirit – an esprit – that has sustained the society ever since.
Looking back, I see the history of ESPRit less as a sequence of institutional milestones than as a sustained practice of academic hospitality. Not hospitality as metaphor, but as enacted ethos.
Phipps and Barnett (2007) describe academic hospitality as taking material, epistemological, linguistic and touristic forms. It is material in the hosting of scholars; epistemological in the welcoming of new ideas; linguistic in translation and multilingual exchange; and touristic in the generosity extended to academic travellers. ESPRit has practised all of these, sometimes deliberately, often instinctively.
From the beginning, conferences were conceived as more than scholarly gatherings. The first conference, held at the Burgess Foundation in Manchester in 2011, signalled that periodical studies belonged in conversation with cultural life beyond the university. Later meetings, for instance, at the Nordic Museum in Stockholm, the National Library of Greece in Athens and the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest, continued this tradition of collaborating with cultural institutions. These venue choices embodied a commitment to situating scholarship within living archives, museums and libraries.
The conferences, together with the founding of the Journal of European Periodical Studies as an open-access journal, formed the backbone of the society. The decision to make JEPS open access was itself a practice of hospitality – lowering thresholds, widening participation, refusing enclosure – argued for by its first editor-in-chief Marianne Van Remoortel from the moment the idea of a journal was floated at an early meeting in Salford Quays in 2013.
But what has always distinguished ESPRit, in my experience, is not only these structural forms, but first and foremost its affective atmosphere.
While Phipps and Barnett (2007) identify the formal dimensions of academic hospitality, later work has insisted that hospitality must also be understood as spatial, relational and affective. Zembylas (2020) argues that hospitality unfolds through affective atmospheres, through embodied encounters and emotional intensities that shape how space is experienced. Similarly, Imperiale et al. (2021) extend academic hospitality beyond intellectual exchange, emphasising its material and convivial practices, including virtual rituals and forms of care. Hospitality, in this sense is enacted through gestures, atmospheres and everyday practices.
If I read ESPRit through this lens, what stands out is its warmth.
The society has always had a remarkably flat structure. Even as we formalised – drafting statutes, registering as a society, opening a bank account – we tried to preserve minimal hierarchy. Leadership rotated. Conferences were organised by new colleagues. Postgraduate workshops were launched to create space for inclusion and genuine welcome. The atmosphere at conferences has consistently been described in affective terms: feeling at home, feeling encouraged, feeling supported.
Affective hospitality does not mean the absence of critique. On the contrary, it enables rigorous exchange precisely because scholars feel sufficiently secure to take intellectual risks. Derrida’s understanding of hospitality as an ethical openness to the unexpected – being “ready to not be ready” – depends on relational trust (Derrida, 2002). ESPRit has managed, remarkably, to combine intellectual seriousness with generosity, humour and care.
For me personally, this has mattered deeply. My own research trajectory moved away from periodical studies many years before I stepped down from active work in ESPRit, but I remained (perhaps clung) because ESPRit embodied values I believed in: reciprocity, openness, shared endeavour. Small gestures of encouragement, steady collegial backing, quiet advocacy, these enacted hospitality in ways no statute could mandate.
The society’s collaborations with cultural institutions, its multilingual aspirations, its memoranda of understanding with research institutions and networks, all these are structural expressions of hospitality. But the energy that made ESPRit “fly” has always been esprit: spirit, liveliness, shared commitment.
Energy and spirit are more than soft qualities. They are organisational forces. They have carried ESPRit through moments of uncertainty, after funding cycles ended, during leadership transitions, through the shift to online formats. When the 9th conference had to go online in the middle of the covid pandemic, Nora Ramtke and her team at Bochum sent local treats by post, a gesture that captured that hospitality persists even when mobility is curtailed.
Reflecting on ESPRit’s history from my perspective, then, I see a community that has practised academic hospitality across material, epistemological, linguistic and touristic dimensions, and that has also cultivated affective hospitality as spatial, embodied and relational practice.
But at the centre remains esprit, the energy, warmth and shared spirit that made people want to return, to contribute, to host and to be hosted.
Structures matter. Journals matter. Conferences and seminar series matter. But what has sustained ESPRit is the atmosphere in the room – physical or virtual – when scholars meet as colleagues and leave as something closer to friends.
That, to me, is its history.
References
Derrida, J. (2002). Acts of Religion. Routledge.
Imperiale, M. G., Phipps, A., & Fassetta, G. (2021). On Online Practices of Hospitality in Higher Education. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 40: 629–648. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-021-09770-z
Phipps, A., & Barnett, R. (2007). Academic Hospitality. Arts & Humanities in Higher Education, 6(3): 237–254. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474022207080829
Zembylas, M. (2020). From the Ethic of Hospitality to Affective Hospitality: Ethical, Political and Pedagogical Implications of Theorizing Hospitality Through the Lens of Affect Theory. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 39: 37–50. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-019-09666-z
