Women Editors in Europe, 1710-1920

an International Conference

28-29 May 2019, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium

http://www.womeneditors.ugent.be/

Research on women’s contributions to the periodical press often focuses on women’s periodicals, considering them as separate “feminized” spaces devoted to the interests of particular circles of female readers.

This conference takes a different approach. Focusing on women editors rather than women’s periodicals, it explores how periodical editorship enabled women to create public voices, participate in public debate

and act as agents of change far beyond their immediate sphere of influence.

As part of the European Research Council funded project “Agents of Change: Women Editors and Socio-Cultural Transformation in Europe, 1710-1920,” we invite papers on a wide variety of topics related to female
periodical editorship in Europe in the broadest historical sense of the word (not just the current European Union) from the early eighteenth to the early twentieth century.

Topics may include:

• Women editors as makers of culture or arbiters of taste
• Women editors as advocates of social change
• Women editors as proponents of women’s rights
• Women editors as mediators (e.g. transnational or cross-cultural)
• Women’s editorial identities
• Women’s editorial strategies
• Female editorship and/as authorship
• Male editors adopting female editorial personae
• Women taking on multiple roles as editors, authors, publishers, translators, salon hostesses, activists etc.
• Women editing behind the scenes as subeditors, assistants, editors’ wives etc. or influencing (male) editors in their own creative ways
• Women editors’ networks
• Digital periodical studies focusing on women editors and their periodicals
• Gendered approaches to theories of editorship

We invite case studies of individual editors as well as comparative, theoretical or methodological approaches. We are particularly interested in papers examining women’s editorship across chronological or language boundaries.

The working language of the conference is English. We welcome proposals from researchers at all stages of their careers.

Proposals of around 250 words (references not included) for 20-minute papers and a short CV (no more than 200 words) should be sent to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. by 15 November 2018.

We also welcome proposals for joint panels of three papers. Please include a brief rationale for the panel along with an abstract and CV for each presenter.

Updates can be found on the Women Editors Conference Website: http://www.womeneditors.ugent.be/

Writing Time: Temporalities of the Periodical in the Eighteenth Century
Panel at ISECS International Congress on the Enlightenment, Edinburgh, July 14-19, 2019

In this panel we aim to investigate eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century journals and related forms of periodical publication in light of their relationship to time. Periodicity is perhaps the most obvious temporal feature of medial formats such as journals, magazines, moral weeklies, and newspapers: the recurring intervals at which periodicals appear undeniably shape production and reception. Furthermore, journals and their contributors report or comment on current events; they organize material according to recognizable patterns (rubrics and genres), which establish repetition and variation over time; they experiment with various modes of seriality; and they rework long-standing metaphors for time in the context of the journal format.

We invite case studies of journals, authors, literary texts, and periodical genres that shed light on the many ways in which periodicals “write time.” How do authors, editors, or journals respond to the temporal constraints and possibilities of periodical publishing in the eighteenth century? How do they represent newness and tradition, history and revolution? Which aesthetic, material, and medial strategies do periodicals deploy in archiving accounts of the past, present, or (imagined) future and thereby creating new temporalities? And how do journal-specific temporalities map onto other modes of prose narrative such as conjectural history, historiography, ethnography, travel writing, urban reportage, antiquarianism, or the novel?

Sean Franzel, University of Missouri, and Nora Ramtke, Ruhr-Universität Bochum.

Please send your proposal (max. 1000 words) and a short biographical note by December 15, 2018 to Sean Franzel (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) and Nora Ramtke (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.).
We will notify you January 15, 2019 about whether your submission has been accepted. We will then submit the panel to the ISECS committee. The final confirmation is expected by March 15, 2019.

For further information on the ISECS Congress, please visit: https://www.bsecs.org.uk/isecs/en

Women’s Press – Women of the Press

Women’s Periodicals and Women Editors in the Ottoman Space

House of Culture, Rethymno, November 9-11, 2018

 The Exhibition and Conference entitled Women’s Press – Women of the Press are organized by the Department of Philosophy and Social Studies of the University of Crete in collaboration with the Hellenic Open University (Master’s Program in Public History), under the auspices of the Regional Unit of Rethymno. They concern women’s publishing activity during the late Ottoman period, and more precisely during the period extending from the first women’s periodical publication year (1845) to the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire (1923).  They include both women’s press of all genres and its impact in the public space, and women as editors, contributors and readership.

See more at the Conference website : http://ottomanwomenspress.fks.uoc.gr/

Workshop Stereotypes in Motion. On changing letterpress/image relations in illustrated magazines and books (1830-1860)

22-23 May 2019, Ruhr Universität Bochum

• hosted within the DFG-funded research unit “Journal Literature: Rules of Format, Visual Design, and Cultures of Reception” by the sub-project “Text and Image in ‘Konkurrenz’”
• coordinated by PD Dr. Andreas Beck (Universität Bochum), in cooperation with PD Dr. Madleen Podewski (Freie Universität Berlin)
• submission deadline February 15, 2019

In the early and mid 19^th century, the increasing adoption of wood engraving and the booming transnational trade in stereotypes (casts from wood engravings) effect a popularization of pictures throughout western culture. Moreover, this mediated migration of xylographic illustrations pushes forward the formation of new modes of combining letterpress and images on pages and on openings. This development becomes obvious on any reading-viewing of illustrated periodicals (of the Penny Magazine and of the Illustrated London News genre, of caricature magazines, and later on of ‹Familienblätter›: family magazines such as Gartenlaube) and books (for example Laurent’s/Vernet’s Histoire de l’Empereur Napoléon or Old Nick’s/Grandville’s Petites misères de la vie humaine). Nevertheless, little research has been done to investigate the changes that stereotyped wood engravings brought to the visuality of print culture. There are some studies in manufacturing processes (paper stereotyping, electrotyping), but little in marketing strategies and their logistic and economic aspects. And almost no attention has been paid to the important role that stereotyped wood engravings play in the ambitious and dynamic visual culture of the 19^th century.

We expect our Workshop to continue and/or initiate detailed explorative research in this field. Studies in stereotypes are particularly suitable to grasp the specificity of the print-media aspect of the visual culture of the period. Transnational trade in stereotypes provoked a cascade of changes in the relationship between letterpress and image in Europe and beyond. Both in terms of technical possibilities and in terms of the economics of publishing, it makes possible the emergence of the phenomenon, and of the term, ›illustration‹. In the process, the transnational flow of stereotypes encourages rearrangements of pictorial and verbal elements which are recombined and paratextually framed in convergent or divergent ways in different magazines and/or books in different locations. These recombinations alter the visual qualities of both typeset text and images, and draw attention to the flexibility of their relations, ranging from strictly word-governed pictures to typography with emphatic visuality. Analyzing these layout practices offers the opportunity to observe the emergence of a transnational verbal-visual syntax, as well as to witness the formation of local verbal-visual idioms.

We call for proposals for papers (in English or German) from book and media studies, from art and literary history, concerned with these or related topics. Papers should focus on the migration of stereotypes (principally of wood engravings), and its effects on the relations between letterpress and picture, or word and image, in the print-media culture of this period. Studies in economic aspects and market strategies of stereotype trading are most welcome, for example investigations of trade networks, or of logistic aspects of export/import practices. We will welcome studies which explore the impact of stereotype trading’s economic dimension on the visual design of illustrated magazine pages/openings.

Contributions will be published in the research unit’s e-journal PeriodIcon. Studien zur visuellen Kultur des Journals / Studies in the visual culture of journals.

Please submit your proposal (max. 500 words) and a short CV by February 15, 2109 latest to:

PD Dr. Andreas Beck: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

PD Dr. Madleen Podewski: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.