CFP: Digital Poster Session

Spring Symposium 2018:
Editorship as Collaboration: Patterns of Practice in Multi-Ethnic Periodicals
April 27-28, 2018 at the American Antiquarian Society
Worcester, MA

While scholars increasingly recognize the impact of periodicals on social, political, and aesthetic histories, few have explored the range of editorial and collaborative practices that animate their creation and circulation. Invoking editorship as a conceptual model and an area of inquiry, this symposium will support critical conversations about method, affiliation, and the historical arcs of diverse communities as they are developed and addressed through a range of periodical forms. An emphasis on multi-ethnic perspectives responds to important recent work on immigrant, Latin@, and African American print cultures that intersect in their attention to periodicals. Beginning with theories of archival attention, such as Eric Gardner’s “unexpected places,” Rodrigo Lazo’s “migrant archives,” and Kirsten Silva-Gruesz’s “ambassadorship,” invited panelists will participate in larger discussions structured around what Sianne Ngai has defined as “vernacular aesthetics,” those that, like the rhythms of editorship, “operate across much longer spans of time and across much larger swaths of culture” (Aesthetic Categories, 16). We anticipate that a focus on vernacular aesthetics and cultural producers beyond the author will generate alternative theories of editorial practice and historical forms.

We seek proposals for nineteenth-century newspaper and periodical-based digitization projects to be displayed at the American Antiquarian Society’s Spring Symposium 2018. In this digital poster session, we aim to support scholars from early stages of their careers or lower-resourced institutions. Participants will have the opportunity to select small runs of or selections from important serials in the AAS collections to digitize. Scholars will exhibit these materials at a digital poster session, exploring the promises and challenges of digitizing serial texts into appropriate electronic forms. This session will enable participants to share work around these questions with one another, thus encouraging direct, concrete cross-pollination of expertise and scholarly experience.

To be considered, please submit a short proposal (300-500 words) identifying a serial publication from the American Antiquarian Society collection for digitization. The scope of the digitized materials may be chosen in concert with symposium organizers and AAS staff. Any serial publication held by the American Antiquarian Society is eligible. The presence of your publication in another digital database will not exclude it from consideration. All materials digitized by AAS will be available in their digital asset management system GIGI (http://gigi.mwa.org/), and available for use as stipulated on their website under “Freely Available Images Online”: http://www.americanantiquarian.org/reproductions.htm.

Proposals should include:
1. The title, print run (or selection) and a permanent link to the serial from the AAS Catalog.
2. A brief summary of the publication’s relevance to our focus on multiethnic editorship and collaboration. Proposals might address questions like: How are processes of collaboration illustrated or dramatized in this example? How does this publication focus on external or internal communities, and how does the paper, and its editors, understand the exchanges between such communities? What historical or archival contexts/difficulties/conditions structure your example?
3. A brief description of the purpose of this publication in this context. Why this publication? Why now? What makes this a productive example for a range of users from introductory students to archivists and scholars?

Follow this link to access the AAS digital catalogue: http://catalog.mwa.org
As well as this link to learn more about AAS serials collections: http://www.americanantiquarian.org/newspapers-periodicals

Please send your submission to Jim Casey (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) and Sarah Salter (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) as a Word document along with a short CV. Submissions should be received by Monday, Oct 2. Selected participants will be notified via email by the end of October. Final acceptance will be conditional on membership in RSAP.

Editing the Twentieth Century

The British Library

5 September 2017

Call for Papers

What do editors actually do? What makes a good editor? And more importantly, what makes a successful editor? From the Times Literary Supplement to Les Temps Modernes and Novyi Mir, from The Criterion to Die neue Rundschau and Spare Rib, there can be no doubting the influence of literary-intellectual magazines in selecting and shaping our cultural knowledge, our beliefs and values. But we still know surprisingly little about how these crucial cultural institutions were led and managed and even how day-to-day editorial duties were undertaken in practice. Above all, we lack any kind of comparative perspective on the role of the periodical editor, both across national and historical boundaries and across different types of publications. How does the role of editor compare between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, for example, or between the French and British intellectual fields? How does it vary across literary reviews, newspapers, academic journals and commercial magazines? And in all these cases, how can we reconcile the reality of editorial practice – so often mundane and resolutely collective –with the stubbornly persistent myth of the singular charismatic editor?

As part of the British Academy funded project, Editing the Twentieth Century, we invite papers and workshop contributions addressing these issues for a one-day event to be held at the British Library on 5 September 2017 exploring the key role played by the editors of periodical publications throughout the long twentieth century. As well as specific studies of individual editors and publications, we particularly welcome comparative analyses (both chronological and geographical), theoretical approaches, and reflections from practitioners. Contributors may choose to address one or more of the following issues:

• Editorial success and failure
• Editorial responsibilities, competences and dispositions
• Editorial foundations, programmes, and manifestos
• Editorial succession
• Editorial leadership and administration
• Editorial creativity and sociability
• Editorship as authorship
• Collective and uncredited editorship
• Comparative studies across periodical genres, national contexts, and historical periods

Proposals of around 250 words for 20-minute papers should be sent to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. by 15 March 2017. We also welcome proposals for joint panels of three or four related papers or other forms of presentation and discussion.

Professor Matthew Philpotts
University of Liverpool

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Registration is now open for the Newspaper and Periodical History Forum of Ireland's (NPHFI) 2017 conference '"Fake News!": An Historical Perspective' that takes place at Newcastle University, UK, on Friday 10 and Saturday 11 November.

This year's conference features two very exciting keynotes from Prof. James Curran (Goldsmiths, University of London) on 'The moral decline of the British press' and Prof. Aled Gruffyd Jones (Panteion University,
Athens), 'Is news fake? A long view'.

Fake news is a term that has become familiar in late 2016 and 2017, not least because of international political developments. But is it necessarily a new phenomenon? The control, presentation and manipulation
of news has played a key role in the, sometimes tumultuous, history of Anglo-Irish relations. And a similarly important role in the assertion and subversion of power in colonial, totalitarian and radical societies throughout history worldwide.

To what extent does fake news, and its close relative propaganda, represent active falsification of information and the dissemination of misinformation, as opposed to the reporting of mistakes or errors due to confusion? What are the implications of the accusation of fake news for a report or news outlet? How does historical perspective change the evaluation of whether something is fake news? The NPHFI seeks to investigate this phenomenon and its historical application in the print media at its tenth annual conference.

Registration is via the NPHFI's Eventbrite page (www.eventbrite.ie/e/fake-news-an-historical-perspective-nphfi-conference-2017-tickets-38503196096).
For further information keep an eye on NPHFI social media: facebook.com/NPHistoryForum , Twitter @NPHistoryForum.

Mediating American Modernist Literature:
The case of/ for Big Magazines
1880-1960
Aix-Marseille Université, LERMA (EA 853)
Aix-en-Provence, France, October 5- 7, 2018

This interdisciplinary conference seeks to explore the role played by “Big Magazines” in the production, publication, circulation, and reception of American literature between 1880 and 1960.

The study of modernism’s relations to the press and periodical culture is certainly not new to Modernist Studies. Over the last three decades, sustained interest in the role played by “little magazines” has been instrumental in reorienting the conventional reading of magazines “merely as containers of concrete bits of information” to an approach that considers them as “autonomous objects of study,” comparable with individual books (Latham and Scholes) in the field of modernism.

However, this interest has, so far, been directed mostly towards little magazines, as if these were the only periodicals intersecting with modernist practices. In doing so, it has tended to insulate little magazines as a field separate from other kinds of contemporary periodicals (the lowbrow pulps, the middlebrow slick/smart/mainstream/big periodicals), reducing the latter, at best, to a kind of dim cultural fringe or hinterland of modernism. It is only recently that modernist studies have begun to deal directly with the institutional overlap of literary modernism and middlebrow culture, enriching our understanding of their deep affiliations, by focusing on such middlebrow and smart magazines as Life (in its first form), The Smart Set, Vanity Fair or The New Yorker.

In the wake of such studies, the purpose of this conference is to expand consideration of the connection between American literature and mainstream print culture so as to include “an eclectic range of periodical genres having in common, beyond the necessary qualification of being unapologetically commercial, …a conscious effort to expand their readerships by way of their textual and visual styles rather than their content” (Harris, 6). Mainstream print culture includes a vast array of diverse magazines, united by their ambition to speak to a wide national audience and, often, to forge the cultural, literary and political tastes of the middle class, with periodicals such as Harper’s, Scribner’s, Saturday Evening Post, Atlantic Monthly, Reader’s Digest, Life or Henry Luce’s Time. To this same field of national periodicals one can also relate magazines with a narrower editorial scope, selecting their audience on an ideological (McClure’s) or ethnic (The Crisis) basis, or along gender lines, as with the women-oriented Munsey’s and Ladies’ Home Journal and the more masculine Esquire, a precursor in many ways of the men’s magazines that emerged with and around Playboy in the early 1950s.

We invite papers that explore the interaction between mass-market magazines and modernist literary and aesthetic preoccupations over the time span of eighty years, from the emergence of industrialized journalism and the “fully-fledged magazine” (Scholes) to the rise of television as a most influential medium, and the coincident decline of the magazine as “the major form of repeated cultural experience for people in the United States” (Ohmann, 29). Taking into account transatlantic influences – such as Vu’s influence on Henry Luce’s decision to remodel Life after 1936, or connections between Condé Nast and Lucien Vogel, creator of the French edition of Vogue – we would also like to encourage transatlantic perspectives involving French magazines.

Subjects might include, but are not limited to, the following:

• overlaps, parallels & points of intersection between “little”, “middlebrow”, & “pulp” magazines;
• the influence of magazine work on literary work (form, content, imagination);
• the role of magazines in fostering creative nonfiction stories;
• the role of aesthetic, financial, & commercial preoccupations in shaping editorial policies & contents;
• the links, interactions, & networks among writers, publishers, editors, & agents;
• the construction of “complex literary milieus” (Ohmann);
• the identification of style as a promotional tool;
• the link with the phenomenon of celebrity & the rise of popular celebrity culture;
• the role of interviews and portraits in fashioning authorial personae;
• the role of magazines in creating literary institutionalization & professionalization;
• transatlantic exchanges & influences with French magazines (Vu, Voilà, Match, or Marie Claire).

For more information, and to submit an abstract, follow the link:

https://bigmagazines.sciencesconf.org/