ESPRIT is pleased to announce the launch of the fourth series of ESPRit Online Seminars on Periodicals and the Law. This series will feature two presentations examining the legal and cultural dimensions of periodical publishing, with a particular focus on image rights, censorship, and transnational media flows.
23 May 2025, 14:00 CEST
Chair: Gábor Dobó
Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel
Professor at the University of Geneva, Chair of Digital Humanities
‘The Legal Labyrinth of Image-Based Research: Insights from the Visual Contagions Project’
Copyright law remains one of the most frustrating obstacles for art historians—especially for those working with illustrations from periodicals, and even more so when dealing with large-scale digitized corpora. At the heart of the issue lies a challenge: identifying, dating, and locating the publication of images. Drawing on the Visual Contagions project—a research initiative on globalization through images in the 19th and 20th centuries—this presentation will highlight key moments where legal considerations around copyright (including reproduction, dissemination, and data mining) must be taken into account. It will also outline some of the strategies developed to navigate these constraints.
Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel is a full professor at the University of Geneva, Chair of Digital Humanities. She leads the Visual Contagions project, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, which focuses on the global circulation of images in the 20th century. A specialist in artistic and cultural globalization, she is widely recognized for her trilogy on the global and social history of avant-gardes, published by Gallimard (paperback: volumes 1 and 2) and CNRS Editions (volume 3) (English translation in progress for Brill publishings). Last publication: L'Art contemporain. Une infographie, with Guillemette Crozet (Paris:CNRS Editions, 2024).
23 June 2025, 15:00 CEST
Chair: Andrew Hobbes
Céline Mansanti
University of Picardie-Jules Verne, France
‘La Vie Parisienne in the 1920s US: “New Puritanism”, Censorship and Self-Censorship’
This presentation is based on a work in progress on the cultural transfer of La Vie parisienne and other humorous French magazines (such as Le Rire, Le Sourire, Le Journal amusant, etc.) to the US between 1913 and 1939. Cumulatively attracting millions of French readers during the Belle Époque (roughly between the 1870s and 1914), these French light, comic, risqué, satirical illustrated magazines had a rich, second, later life in the US where they contributed to massive reactions against the “new Puritanism” (Mencken) prevailing in the American society. In particular, they helped reshape the magazine landscape when “sex o’clock” (Current Opinion, vol. 55, n°2, August 1913) started to chime around 1913, contributing, in the 1910s, to the modernization of the triad of classic humor magazines (Puck, Judge, Life) and helping a “smart” magazine such as Vanity Fair find its distinctive, sophisticated voice; encouraging the creation of a set of small humorous magazines in the 1920s (such as French Frolics La Vie Parisienne, French Humor, Joe Burten’s magazines); and taking part in the birth of a whole line of French-themed spicy pulps (such as Parisienne Monthly, Gay Parisienne, Paris Nights, and La Paree Stories), mostly in the 1930s. In this talk, I will focus on La Vie parisienne and show how, in the 1920s, this magazine inspired several American publications (fully-fledged magazines or “Vie parisienne” issues of existing magazines) committed to fighting “new Puritanism”. A good number of these publications printed approximate copies of La Vie parisienne’s risqué illustrations, triggering censorship actions reported in the press. Censorship in turn generated self-censorship phenomena. Studying how censorship operations were reported in the press of the time and comparing some of the original illustrations published in La Vie parisienne with those copied in these American publications should help us highlight some of the censorship and self-censorship mechanisms in the “new Puritan” America of the 1920s and see that the “Roaring Twenties” did not roar for everyone everywhere.
Céline Mansanti is an associate professor in American history at the University of Picardie-Jules Verne in France. She wrote her PhD thesis on transition magazine (La revue transition, 1927-1938, le modernisme historique en devenir, Rennes, PUR, 2009). Her field of interest is the cultural history of the United States and its relationships with Europe in the first half of the 20th century, with a special focus on periodicals. She is currently writing a manuscript entitled “‘Sex O’Clock in America’: The cultural transfer of La Vie parisienne, Le Rire, and other French humorous magazines to the US, 1913-1939”.
Registration
The seminar is free, and all are welcome to attend.
➡️ To receive the Zoom link for the seminar by Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel please fill in the Registration Form by clicking here.
➡️To receive the Zoom link for the seminar by Céline Mansanti please fill in the Registration Form by clicking here.