Key info
📅 30 June – 2 July 2027
📍 Utrecht University, the Netherlands
⏰ Abstract submission deadline: 18 December 2026
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Call for Papers
As sites of intense collaboration and cultural commentary, periodicals are a forge for the development of personae – literary, professional, intellectual or otherwise. Periodical platforms are gatekeepers of social mobility, offering media visibility, facilitating self-branding and producing cultural capital. For writers, they offer a forum to attune their posture or ethos to their developing readerships. But editorial and production teams comprise different professional, artistic and affective typologies and models, too. Editors act as assemblers connecting authors, publishers, objectives and readers, as intermediaries for different imagined communities, and as cultural brokers: think for example of the multilingual ethos of Marguerite Caetani’s literary journal, Commerce.
In the process of crafting a particular voice, setting agendas, and representing their readers, periodicals can also develop distinct personalities of their own. These personae can take the shape of a forceful editorial position in concert with, or opposition to, the prevailing ‘common sense’ – as in The Tatler and other moral weeklies of the eighteenth century, or Punch throughout the nineteenth century. The periodical may even name itself after such a persona (for instance, The British Workman and Workwoman, De Huisvriend, La femme libre). Personae can also be produced collectively, by the visual, temporal, and other periodical codes that emerge through the united effort of editorial and production teams (e.g. Charlie Hebdo’s signature bête et méchant style).
Moreover, periodicals are often a rich archive for the discovery of forgotten names, complementing and contesting dominant literary histories both in their day, and after the fact. They are a key site where the power and freedom of anonymity is cultivated when authors face persecution or experiment with dissident social identities, and they can be intense sites for the navigation of social and political censorship: consider the flourishing of self-produced underground magazines at key historical junctures. The shifting pseudonyms behind La femme libre (1832-4), for instance, allowed women to engage in unheard-of critique of marriage. Anonymous reader letters brim with stiff opinions that might not otherwise find their way into print – begging the question of the relationship between authors, their convictions, and public expression.
Potential Topics
We propose taking the concept of personae as our lens to explore a range of thematic, stylistic and practical questions, including, but not limited to:
- Journalistic ethos & reputational development
- Reader attachment & parasocial relationships
- Authorship attribution & associated archival adventures
- Creation of continuity & title changes
- Distributed agency in the production process, incl. design, advertisement, and censorship
- Collective authorship & editorial lines
- Periodical genres & celebrity culture
- Literary feuds & frauds
- Periodicals as a site of the performance of (dissident, minor, subaltern) identities
Submission Guidelines
We welcome proposals from researchers at all stages in their careers. Proposals of up to 300 words for individual 20-minute papers and a short biographical note should be sent to
ESPRit is committed to promoting research in diverse languages. Most of the proceedings will take place in English, but we welcome proposals in other languages, and can facilitate French and Dutch. If you are interested in contributing (a panel) in another language, we welcome you to submit a proposal in one of our current working languages. Depending on the submissions, we will see what accommodations we can provide.
Deadline for abstracts: 18 December 2026.
Confirmed Keynotes
Prof. dr. Esther Op de Beek — Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Esther Op de Beek is Professor of Modern Dutch Literature at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her research interests include contemporary Dutch-language literature, travel writing, literary culture, and the relationship between literature and wellbeing. Her publications include Avenue verruimt de blik. De medialogica van een mondain magazine (Leiden University Press, 2025), a study of the magazine Avenue and its media logic.
Further Information
Postgraduate Workshop
As in previous years, there will be a postgraduate workshop ahead of the main conference. The Call for Papers for this training workshop will be circulated separately.
Venue
Panels and keynotes will be hosted at Utrecht University. Utrecht is a UNESCO City of Literature and, moreover, conveniently situated. It is a 30-minute train journey from Amsterdam and its main airport, Schiphol, and has an international train station.
Scientific Committee
To be announced.
Organising Committee
- Flore Janssen (Utrecht University)
- Sophie van den Elzen (Utrecht University)
- Maaike Koffeman (Radboud University Nijmegen)
- Usha Wilbers (Radboud University Nijmegen)
- Monica Jansen (Utrecht University)
Contact
✉️ Email:
