The 2022 ESPRit Prize was awarded jointly to Agents of Change: Women Editors and Socio-Cultural Transformation in Europe, 1710–1920 (WeChangEd) and Clare Pettitt’s Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815–1848.
WeChangEd was an ERC Starting Grant project directed by Marianne Van Remoortel and based at the Department of Literary Studies at Ghent University. From 2015 to 2021, seven researchers and seven student interns combined expertise in literary studies, the digital humanities and the social sciences to investigate the impact of women editors on public debate and social and cultural change across Europe.
Across the period studied, women faced substantial barriers to education, political participation and public life. WeChangEd shows that editing periodicals gave them opportunities to address readers beyond their immediate circles. Through their publications, women editors established transnational networks, exchanged ideas across linguistic and national borders, and contributed to debates about culture, social values and women’s rights. The project website presents this research through stories and linked data that help visitors explore the editors and their connections.
In Serial Forms (Oxford University Press, 2020), Clare Pettitt examines the cultural and political significance of seriality between 1815 and 1848. Her study follows serial forms beyond periodicals and fiction published in instalments, considering how recurring and circulating texts, images and performances shaped experiences of news, history and modern life.
Drawing closely on historical evidence, Pettitt challenges conventional divisions of the nineteenth century and questions familiar assumptions about what constituted a “book” and how works reached their audiences. Readings of writers including Walter Scott, Lord Byron, Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell show how literary works moved through different forms and media. The book thus places seriality at the centre of a new account of nineteenth-century culture and its political possibilities.
Congratulations to Marianne Van Remoortel and the WeChangEd team, and to Clare Pettitt on their joint award.
