ESPRit Postgraduate Workshop on Periodical Studies

Call for Papers

13^th International ESPRit Conference (Málaga, 2025)

3 September 2025

Universidad de Málaga

Deadline for applications: 17 February 2025

We are pleased to announce that a postgraduate workshop will be held on 3 September 2025 alongside the 13^th ESPRit Conference “Periodicals as Cultural Assemblages”.

The workshop is open to all postgraduate students working on any topic related to periodicals from any historical, geographical or cultural perspective.

Candidates should provide the following documents:

1. An academic CV showing your studies, scholarly interests, and any other important merits/publications.

2. A 500-word formal abstract for the Workshop. Please avoid case studies. Focus instead on specific methodological approaches pertaining to periodical studies. Workshops presentations should last 10 minutes.

3. A statement specifying how your proposal relates to periodical studies. Please indicate if this area of study is not familiar to you.

4. A one-page outline of your on-going research or PhD thesis (in the latter case specify: title, supervisor, affiliation, and approximate date of completion).

If you want to submit a proposal, please send these documents to the organisers (Subject: “ESPRit Postgraduate Workshop on Periodical Studies”) at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. by 17 February 2025. The main working language of the conference is English, but proposals for papers in other languages will be taken into consideration as long as they are presented according to specific instructions agreed upon with the organizers.

We hope to see you in Málaga!

Selecting Committee:

Rosario Arias, University of Málaga
Sara Robles Ávila, University of Málaga
Evanghelia Stead, UVSQ Paris-Saclay
Gábor Dobó, Kassák Museum (PIM–MNMKK)
Laurel Brake, Birkbeck, University of London
Sophie van den Elzen, Utrecht University

THOMAS SMITS (University of Amsterdam): ‘Machine Learning Meets Victorian Media: Tracking Transnational News Images’.

Periodicals and the Law, Seminar 6: 25 November 2024, 15:00 CET (Chair: Nora Ramtke)

This presentation explores the transnational circulation of images in nineteenth-century periodicals using computational methods. While images were crucial to the period's periodical press, tracing their movement across publications, languages, and national boundaries has long challenged researchers. By applying machine learning techniques to match illustrations between the famous American periodical Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper and several major European journals, this research demonstrates new possibilities for analyzing cross-cultural media exchange. It uncovers a complex network of artistic and technological transfer, illuminating the movement of entrepreneurs, illustrators, engravers, and visual content across national borders. This presentation is based on joint work with Paul Fyfe.

Dr. Thomas Smits is assistant professor of digital history and AI at the University of Amsterdam. A historian with an interest in visual culture and computer-assisted methodologies, he is author of The Visual Memory of Protest (AUP, 2023), which he co-edited with Ann Rigney, and the prize-winning The European Illustrated Press and the Emergence of a Transnational Visual Culture of the News, 1842–1870 (Routledge, 2020). Recent work has been published in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, Visual Studies, New Media & Society, and Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. More information: thomassmits.eu.

Please register here to receive the Zoom link: https://www.espr-it.eu/index.php?option=com_rsform&view=rsform&formId=34

13th ESPRit Conference: Periodicals as Cultural Assemblages

Call for Papers

The European Society for Periodical Research (ESPRit) is pleased to announce its 13th annual Conference, to be held at the University of Málaga on 3-5 September 2025.

This conference aims to look at the different ways in which periodicals can be considered as cultural assemblages across different periods, languages, and contexts. It welcomes a wide variety of perspectives on and approaches to the term “assemblage” in relation to periodicals and periodical studies. In Mille Plateaux (1980), Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari adopted the term “assemblage” to move beyond traditional notions of structure and hierarchy, and draw attention to the myriad connections, relations, and flows that make up reality. We welcome papers that similarly explore periodicals as complex, interconnected entities that are ultimately constituted by the elements, both material and cultural, that compose them. At the same time, we encourage submissions that approach the idea of studying periodicals as cultural assemblages from a range of theoretical perspectives, methodological frameworks, or disciplinary angles. By opening the term “assemblage” to multiple interpretations, we hope to foster a wide-ranging conversation on how periodicals operate as cultural objects and dynamic, heterogeneous formations in and across different historical, linguistic, and geographical settings.

We invite theoretical reflections, case studies, comparative analyses, and other contributions that consider periodicals as cultural assemblages from a wide range of disciplines, including philology and literary studies, media history, history of publishing and printing, comparative literature, cultural studies, gender studies, reception studies, visual studies, postcolonial and decolonial studies.

Proposals may focus on, but are not limited to, the following topics:

• periodicals as assemblages of forms, formats, and genres;
• periodicals as material constellations, and their digital transformations;
• the webs of relations in and between periodicals (e.g. serialization; miscellanies; issues, runs, editions; supplements);
• periodicals as multimodal texts and the relations between their visual and verbal components;
• the different elements that make up the materiality of periodicals (e.g. typography, paper quality) and their impact on reading experience and the dissemination of ideas;
• reassembling processes such as reprinting, scissors-and-paste, and translation;
• the networks of actors involved in the production, distribution, and consumption of periodicals (e.g. authors, editors, printers, newsagents, readers);
• periodicals as complex knowledge systems or discursive networks (cultural, political, medical, etc.);
• the periodical format and how it enables forms of cultural dissidence (e.g. with regard to race, gender, sexuality);
• the use of historical periodicals in contemporary assemblages (e.g. modern collages).

We welcome proposals from researchers at all career stages. Please submit your proposal to the organizing committee at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. by 4 March 2025. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by 22 April 2025.

Proposals may include 15-20 minute individual papers, panels of 3-4 speakers with a common (and named) theme, and roundtables consisting of 5-minute position statements from 4-6 speakers followed by discussion. Each proposal will include the title (also the overall title for a panel), an abstract of up to 300 words, including individual abstracts for each presentation within a panel, plus a short bio note. ESPRit aims for linguistic inclusiveness by welcoming multilingual presentations. The working languages of the conference are Spanish and English. All presentations should be accompanied by English slides of salient points (titles, quotes, main arguments).

Organising Committee: Sara Robles Ávila (University of Málaga), Rosario Arias (University of Málaga), María Magdalena Flores Quesada (University of Málaga), Manuel Hueso Vasallo (University of Málaga), Lola Artacho Martín (University of Málaga), Carmen González Román (University of Málaga), Alejandro Rojas Jiménez (University of Málaga), Antonio Calvo Maturana (University of Málaga).

Advisory Board: Niall Carson (University of Liverpool), Diana Esteba Ramos (University of Málaga), Livia García Aguiar (University of Málaga), Salvador Peláez Santamaría, Juan Antonio Perles Rochel (University of Málaga), Javier Calle Martín (University of Málaga), Jorge Leiva Rojo (University of Málaga), Miguel Ángel González Campos (University of Málaga), Ann Heilmann (Cardiff University), Patricia Pulham (University of Surrey), Mariaconcetta Costantini (G. d’Annunzio University of Chieti-Pescara), Roxana Patras (Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iasi), Elena Liverani (IULM University), Ana Mancera (University of Sevilla), Victoriano Gaviño (University of Cádiz), María José García Folgado (University of Valencia), Marie Hèléne Maux (University of Strasbourg), Giuseppe Trovato (University Ca’ Foscari), Jin Seo Park (Hankuk University of Foreign Studies), Francisco Medina (University of Trieste), Carmen Galán (University of Extremadura), María Luisa Montero Curiel (University of Extremadura), Mar Campos Figares (University of Almería), María del Carmen Quiles (University of Almería), Eloy Martos Núñez (University of Extremadura), Aurora Martínez Ezquerro (University of La Rioja).

The conference is organised in conjunction with the project RELY “Re-orienting Assemblage Theory in Anglophone Literature and Culture (https://literaryassemblage.com/)”, grant PID2022-137881NB-I00, funded by MCIN/AEI/ 10.13039/501100011033 and by “ERDF A way of making Europe” by the “European Union”.

Third Series of ESPRit Online Seminar 'Periodicals and the Law
Network'

2 October 2024, 13:00 CET  

TEJA VARMA PUSAPATI (Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence, India): ‘Entitling the Woman Writer: The 1842 Copyright Act and The Female Journalist in Eliza Meteyard’s Struggles for Fame (1845)’

Struggles for Fame (1845), a novel by the radical woman journalist Eliza Meteyard (1816–1879) offered one of the earliest fictional representations of the female journalist. The novel’s episodic plot follows the fortunes of Barbara, who, after being saved from ruffians at the age of two, lives with various guardians, including an abusive parish nurse, a wealthy gentleman, a captain who tries in vain to make her a musician, and a packman turned bookseller named Adam Leafdale. Determined to earn her living by writing, Barbara wages a hard and occasionally lonely struggle with the conditions of the literary market, contributing to various ill-paying periodicals and newspapers before shifting to book writing and becoming a celebrated woman of letters. Barbara’s struggles also draw attention to the failure of the recently passed copyright legislation to safeguard the interests of periodical contributors. The Copyright Act of 1842, which, for the first time, extended authors’ copyright beyond their lifetime, supported the idea that the best of authors were likely to receive their due from the market gradually and over a long period. As various scholars have shown, the very notion that an author had proprietary rights over his/her production was historically based on an understanding of the writer as an inventor of a novel idea. Since journalists worked collaboratively, and often under direct instructions from periodical editors and owners, it was particularly difficult to identify the source of originality and to treat the periodical writer as the sole creator of a literary work. My presentation will focus on this crucial, neglected novel and elucidate its representation of the literary market, conditions of authorship, and the professionalisation of women writers in the wake of the 1842 Copyright Act.

Teja Varma Pusapati is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence, India. She has held a TORCH Women in the Humanities writing fellowship at the University of Oxford and an Andrew Mellon Fellowship at the Huntington Library in California. She has served on the Board of Directors of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals. Teja’s work has appeared in the journals Victorian Periodicals Review, Women’s Writing and Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies. She has contributed book chapters to Women, Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain 1830s-1900 and the Routledge Companion to Literature and Feminism. Her first monograph, Model Women of the Press: Gender, Politics and Women’s Professional Journalism, 1850-1880, was recently published by Routledge, New York.

Chair: Cedric Van Dijck

Please register for the event here: https://forms.gle/d6uFkZTBL2keMjoL7