This seminar series was initially organised during the 2023-2024 academic year by Aled Jones and Gioula Koutsopanagou, supported by a sub-group comprising Mara Logaldo and Nora Ramtke, and it is currently in its fourth edition.

Its purpose is to create a network for the creation of collaborative, transnational and comparative work on press regulation and press practices in print and visual material in and across different national contexts with respect to the law, and to the law-related professions of journalists, lawyers, lawmakers. and legal periodicals.

Subjects may include:

• IP and copyright in the context of the notion of protected work, such as printed and visual material (photographs and artworks)
• moral rights (appropriation art, remixes)
• ownership (authors and editors, printed matter, photographers, reporters)
• exceptions and limitations (fair use), infringements, Creative Commons license, civil law protection (rights of privacy, right of publicity, personal data protection), fiscal policies, libel legislation, obscenity laws, state censorship, court injunctions, and state security restrictions (e.g. for national defence in wartime)

The field also includes studies of the persecution and prosecution of reporters, editors, writers and publishers, legal restrictions on ownership (e.g. anti-Trust, anti-monopoly laws), media laws covering advertising, laws covering reporter access (e.g. the UK Lobby system), or geographic areas/militarised zones of restricted access, and war reporting.

It is envisaged that work undertaken by researchers in their own institutions or individually, based on local/national collections, with an interdisciplinary approach, may then be considered in a broader, multinational context.

The online seminars will each last one hour and will consist of two papers of 15 minutes each, followed by discussion.

Recordings of past seminars are available below, organized by date, allowing you to explore topics of interest at your convenience. You may also watch them on YouTube.

 

P&L Seminar 6: 'Machine Learning Meets Victorian Media'

THOMAS SMITS (University of Amsterdam): 'Machine Learning Meets Victorian Media: Tracking Transnational News Images', 25 November 2024. 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 the 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.

---

P&L Seminar 5: 'Entitling the Woman Writer'

TEJA VARMA PUSAPATI (Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence): 'Entitling the Woman Writer: The 1842 Copyright Act and The Female Journalist in Eliza Meteyard’s Struggles for Fame (1845)', 2 October 2024. Chair: Cedric Van Dijck

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.

 

---

P&L Seminar 4: 'Periodicals and AI'

ELENA LAGOUDI (Museologist/Data curator, National Documentation Centre, Athens, Greece): 'Cultural Data in the AI Age: navigating the intersection of cultural datasets, civic value, and AI', 28 May 2024. Chair: Elena Ogliari

The National Documentation Centre (EKT) in Greece, through SearchCulture.gr, the Greek national aggregator for cultural data, plays a pivotal role in widening public access to cultural data in Greece and beyond. This paper will present SearchCulture's content, innovative business model and digital curation methodology which is oriented towards adding social value to cultural data produced through public funding. It will discuss cultural datasets, with a focus on Periodicals, and how AI can revolutionize cultural documentation. It will delve into the benefits of using AI throughout the data lifecycle, from preservation to analysis, highlighting its potential for enhancing understanding and representation of the past.

Elena Lagoudi is a museologist with a focus on data curation, collections management and digital content strategy. Having worked for a decade in national museums in the UK (TATE, The National Gallery) she developed digital products, services, and strategy. Since 2012 she has been working for the National Documentation Centre in Athens, Greece, as part of the team that develops the National Cultural Heritage Aggregator, SearchCulture.gr.

 EVANGELIA VAGENA (Attorney at Law, Ph.D.): 'AI, Copyright Law in print and visual media', 28 May 2024. Chair: Elena Ogliari

We will examine the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and copyright law, with a focus on its implications within the realms of academic journals, legal literature and images' use within. We will focus on AI's role in content creation, curation, and dissemination which has significantly transformed scholarly publishing and legal documentation processes, as well as in the rights’ management process. AI evolution presents multifaceted copyright challenges concerning ownership, infringement, and the application of copyright exceptions, both in AI's input and output. In light of the first EU AI Act, we will examine the main questions posed and the responses provided by current copyright legislation, as well as those addressed by emerging AI-specific laws. Additionally, we will underscore the importance of interdisciplinary dialogue among the legal community, technologists, and policymakers.

Evangelia Vagena is a lawyer specializing in IT law with a focus on copyright law, personal data and cybersecurity. Currently, she serves as the Senior Director of Compliance for the Orfium Group of Companies. From 2019 to 2022, she held the position of Director at the Hellenic Copyright Organisation (HCO), where she had previously worked as a lawyer for 13 years. She earned her PhD from the Athens School of Law, focusing on copyright technological protection and digital rights management. Additionally, she holds a Master's degree in Law and Information Technology from the University of Montpellier I in France. Evangelia is also an adjunct lecturer of Information Law at the Athens University of Economics and Business and a lecturer on contract at the University of Piraeus.

---

P&L Seminar 3: 'Periodicals and the Right to Copy'

WILL SLAUTER (Sorbonne Université): 'Periodicals and the Right to Copy: Copyright Exceptions for the Press Before and After the Berne Convention (1886)', 24 April 2024. Chair: Andrew King

This presentation will explore the history of copyright exceptions for the periodical press in the decades immediately before and after the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works (1886 and subsequent revisions). Comparing national legislation in several European countries and early bi-national copyright treaties as well as the various revisions of the Berne Convention, it will draw attention to contemporary debates about the appropriate rules for the reproduction and translation of contributions to newspapers and other periodicals. Although the history of copyright is most commonly framed as a narrative of expansion over time, the history presented here stresses how in specific national and international contexts there were successful efforts to carve out an explicit right to copy articles from newspapers and other periodicals. Although the broad rights to reproduce material from periodicals found in some of the national statutes and the initial Berne Convention were restricted over time, the history presented here shows how attitudes and practices related to periodical works helped nudge copyright law in specific directions at key moments in its history.

---

P&L Seminar 2: 'Beyond the Taxes on Knowledge'

ANDREW KING (University of Greenwich): 'Beyond the Taxes on Knowledge: the Law and the 1860s English Press', 19 December 2023. Chair: Aled Jones

Summed up in Carlyle’s famous notion of the press as “the Fourth Estate”, discussions of the Law and the British press in the nineteenth century have often been framed in gendered terms of a heroic struggle for freedom from government where opposition to the so-called “Taxes on Knowledge” from the 1830s to 50s has been a focal point. However, regulation of the press is conceptually much more complex than one issue or slogan (however effective such a unifying slogan can be). The laws concerning the press are many and varied, involving diverse actants in a multitude of conflicts on small and large scales: government and legislature (not always identical); owners and managers (again, maybe with different and conflicting aims); workers of many different kinds in manufacturing and distribution; consumers. I shall briefly relate a few case studies concerning some of the remaining legal regulations of the press in the 1860s after the last of the “Taxes on Knowledge” had been repealed in 1861, legal regulations concerning obscenity, libel, copyright, and – very often forgotten altogether – the labour conditions of both printers and distributors.

---

P&L Seminar 1: 'Periodicals and the Press'

JELENA LALATOVIĆ (Institute for Literature and Art, Belgrade): 'Campaigning Against State Repression in the Periodical Press: Censorship and Resistance in the Yugoslav Context (1928˗1938)', 17 November 2023. Chair: Nora Ramtke

In 1928 a prominent Yugoslav writer August Cesarec issued a newspaper The Protection of a Human: an Independent Herald for Human and Civil Rights aimed at campaigning against the Law for the protection of the state, whose main goal was to curb free speech and freedom of expression in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. The newspaper The Protection of a Human thus represents the first periodical of this genre (entirely dedicated to a single cause) in the history of Yugoslav periodicals. Additionally, it established a specific rhetoric of defending the position of the free press, specifically in the genre of reporting. The aim of the research is twofold. Firstly, I would like to explore how the left-wing periodical press of the thirties, which were succumbed to severe censorship and persecution by the authorities, inherited and developed the strategies and tactics set as an example by Cesarec’s newspaper. Along with that, I would like to elaborate on whether this analysis allows us to outline a new classification of these periodicals on the basis that they cherished a specific meta-dimension embodied in their rhetoric and editorial underpinnings – deliberation on the position of the press in an authoritarian society. In other words, I use the Yugoslav context as a case study to examine how the legal framework (including the pretexts such as a libel or offense to restrain the freedom of expression) influenced the typology and morphology of the socially and politically engaged periodicals. The methodology I use relies on a comparative reading of the rhetoric and practice of censorship, which includes an examination of the archival documents of the Central Press Bureau, and periodicals whose editorial policy was based on a systematic opposition to repression and censorship.

MICHAEL LÖRCH (Researcher and translator): 'Decentralized Censorship in a Centralized State: The "Guidance and Control" of Scholarly Periodicals in the German Democratic Republic', 17 November 2023. Chair: Nora Ramtke

The 1949 constitution of the German Democratic Republic boldly declared in its 9^th article that “There is no press censorship”. The country’s second constitution of 1968 avoided the taboo word of ‘censorship’ altogether, declaring instead that the “Freedom of the press, radio and television is guaranteed”. Consequently, there would never be any official law or regulatory text detailing the practice of censorship taking place in the East German state. Instead, the heavily centralized country relied on a decentralized system of ‘control and guidance’, transferring much of the responsibility on individual editors, authors, and other media professionals. Those, however, could, for most of the time, not rely on any document and instead had to anticipate what Party officials deemed printable, creating an atmosphere of mistrust and uncertainty. The practice of censorship therefore took place in a legal grey area, with State and Party relying on the use of euphemisms such as ‘guidance’, ‘control’ and ‘support, framing acts of censorship as sponsorship or the result of economic shortages. Much of the censorship therefore occurred in the form of pre- and self-censorship. The lack of a written law nonetheless created some leeway that resourceful editors and authors could carefully exploit. While these mechanisms have been subject of scholarly interest regarding the country’s book, newspaper and film production, the effect on periodicals has so far been neglected. This paper will therefore illustrate the ‘guidance and control’ exerted on even the most peripheral periodicals by looking at the Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik (1953-present), a scholarly journal of the humanities. Based on the journal and archival material, I will explore how the journal’s editors navigated this system of censorship without a censorship authority and how it influenced the journal and its contents. I will equally investigate how the journal participated in a wider movement, involving various forms of published and unpublished material, to widen the country’s literary canon and academic horizon, for which the ZAA’s international visibility and the very form of the scholarly journal provided opportunities and justifications.

Since 2022, the European Society for Periodical Studies (ESPRit) has awarded the ESPRit Prize to recognize outstanding contributions to the field of European periodical studies. This biennial honorary award of €500 celebrates projects that have had a significant impact on the study of periodicals, fostering international collaboration and advancing research beyond national boundaries.

Who is Eligible?

Eligible projects include, but are not limited to:

✔️ Monographs and edited collections
✔️ Exhibitions and reference works
✔️ Serial publications and journal editorships
✔️ Websites and databases related to Periodical Studies

In the spirit of ESPRit, projects are not limited to the English language, but they must demonstrate a strong influence on European periodical studies beyond their country of origin.

Nominations & Submission

Projects must have been completed within the two years preceding the submission deadline. Nominees do not need to be ESPRit members, but their work should align with ESPRit’s scope (see here).

Nominations can be made by:
✔️ The project’s creator(s)
✔️ Fellow researchers nominating others
✔️ Jury members proposing eligible works

To submit a nomination, nominators must provide a 500-word proposal outlining the project and its impact. The next submission deadline would be at the beginning of 2026. Proposals should be sent to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Award Ceremony & Benefits

The ESPRit Prize is presented at the Annual Meeting, with winners invited to showcase their projects at the next ESPRit conference and on the ESPRit website. In addition to the monetary award, winners receive free ESPRit membership for one year.

For more details or to submit a nomination, contact This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

We are pleased to announce the winner of the 2024 ESPRit Prize for digital projects and/or print research on periodicals in Europe published in 2022/2023.

Congratulations to Marysa Demoor, Cedric Van Dijck and Birgit Van Puymbroeck, editors of The Edinburgh Companion to First World War Periodicals (Edinburgh University Press, 2023), and to all contributing authors.

The ESPRit Prize committee was unanimous in their decision, calling the winning volume a “genuine tour de force”. The committee was “impressed by its vast scope and by the diversity of angles (critical, theoretical, thematic, national, linguistic) from which the different chapters consider the First World War press” and praised “the richness of scholarship produced, from its compelling attention to different critical methodologies, materialities of the press, genres, events and global perspectives”.

 

Joint Winners of the 2022 ESPRit Prize

The European Society for Periodical Studies (ESPRit) is pleased to announce the joint winners of the 2022 ESPRit Prize, recognizing outstanding contributions to the field of European periodical studies:

Agents of Change: Women Editors and Socio-Cultural Transformation in Europe, 1710-1920 / WeChangEd (www.wechanged.ugent.be)
Created by: Marianne Van Remoortel and team, Universiteit Gent

Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815-1848
Author: Clare Pettitt, King’s College London (Oxford University Press)

Congratulations to the winners!

General Series seminars feature keynote lectures, panel discussions, and individual presentations that explore the historical, cultural, and social significance of periodicals across different periods and regions.

Sessions in this series are designed to engage a broad audience, fostering discussions that contribute to the evolving field of periodical research.

If you would like to propose a seminar to ESPRit, please contact the Coordinator of Online Seminars, Bénédicte Coste (Université de Bourgogne) at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Seminar recordings

Recordings of past seminars are available below, organized by date, allowing you to explore topics of interest at your convenience.

You may also watch them on YouTube.

---

 3 March 2023 Knowledge transfer and materiality in and around avant-garde journals

• Gábor Dobó (Kassák Museum–Petőfi Literary Museum, Budapest), ‘Comrades and censors: Tracing implied and actual readers of radical periodicals during the interwar period’
• Merse Pál Szeredi Dobó (Kassák Museum–Petőfi Literary Museum, Budapest), ‘No clichés. Conflicting aspects of knowledge production and printing techniques of avant-garde periodicals’

Chair: Barbara Winckler, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster

3 February 2023 Spaces of Translation: European Magazine Culture, 1945-1965

The members of the research group Spaces of Translation share some of the results from the project.

• Alison E. Martin (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz)
• Marina Popea (Nottingham Trent University)
• Dana Steglich (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz)
• Andrew Thacker (Nottingham Trent University)

Chair: Mara Logaldo, Università IULM

20 January 2023 New Computational Approaches to Periodical Studies

• Thomas Smits (Antwerp University): 'Distant Viewing the Illustrated World of the Illustrated London News, 1842-1900'
• Kaspar Beelen (Alan Turing Institute, UK), 'Mining Victorian Metadata. A computational analysis of historical press directories'
• Ben Lee (University of Washington), 'Newspaper Navigator: Reimagining Digitized Newspapers with Machine Learning'

Chair: Peter Buse, University of Liverpool

 8 December 2022 Joint RSVP/Esprit Online Seminar on The Foreign Language Press

With speakers from TransfoPress, the Transnational network for the study of foreign language press from the 18th-20th century:

• Diana Cooper-Richet (Université Paris-Saclay): "The Transfopress network (2012-2022): object, activities, publications"
• Jennifer Hayward (Wooster college, Ohio) and Michelle Prain (Universidad Adolfo Ibànez, Valparaiso): "The English-Language press in Chile: 19th Century global networks to 21st Century digital dialogues"
• Nicolas Pitsos (BULAC/Université Paris-Saclay): "The foreign-language press and the emergence of a polyphonic capital: the case of Paris"
• Isabelle Richet (Université Paris Cité): "Helen Zimmern and the Italian Gazette: the editor as cultural go-between"

Chair: Fionnuala Dillane, University College Dublin

17 June 2022 Seminar Series: Sources beyond the periodical text

• Nora Ramtke (Ruhr-Universität Bochum), ‘Europa (1835-1844) and its Supplements: Archiving the Abundance’
• Hannah Connell (King’s College London and British Library), ‘Uncovering the relationships between periodicals through editorial correspondence: Networks of Russian-language emigre periodicals in interwar Paris’

Chair: Mara Logaldo, Università IULM

 13 May 2022 Seminar Series: Sources beyond the periodical text

• Zsuzsa Török (Research Centre for the Humanities, Institute for Literary Studies, Budapest), ‘Sources for Anonymous Contributors to Periodicals: The Case of the Hungarian Stephanie Wohl and The Scotsman’
• Levente T. Szabó (Babeș-Bolyai University), ‘Reconstructing the Entangled History of the First International Journal of Comparative Literary Studies’

Chair: Peter Buse, University of Liverpool

10 December 2021 Seminar Series: Crossover influences and local identities of the popular illustrated periodicals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

• Yelizaveta Raykhlina (New York University), 'From Paris to the Russian Provinces: Russian-language Fashion Magazines of the late 1830s and 1840s as Domains of Cultural Adaptation and Women’s Entrepreneurship'
• Effrosyni Zacharatou (Athens School of Fine Arts), 'From Europe to Greece: The illustrated magazine as a distinct form'

Chair: Aled Jones, Panteion University, Athens

 19 November 2021 Seminar Series: Crossover influences and local identities of the popular illustrated periodicals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

•  Susann Liebich (Heidelberg University), 'A New Zealand ‘quality magazine’: The Monocle, 1937-1939'
• Felix Larkin, 'Periodicals and Journalism in Twentieth-Century Ireland'

Chair: Peter Buse, University of Liverpool

5 November 2021 Keynote Lecture

• Evanghelia Stead (Institut Universitaire de France / Université de Versailles), 'Exploring Periodicals through Images and Networks'

Abstract: Supported by individual investigation and collaborative work, the presentation offers a comparative and interdisciplinary approach to periodicals. It broaches the beneficial effects of collective exchange, and flags up some of the counter-productive effects and burdens. It embraces not so much strict methodologies as tactics and ploys to variously approach such a varied and complex field. The talk first discusses visual studies and interdisciplinarity. There follows an overview of group work on periodical networks, stressing the importance of relational dynamics. It further shows the preconceptions and limitations behind such expressions as “little magazine” and the recurrent split separating big mags from small reviews. Its conclusion reasons why periodicals are so fascinating and invites further discussion.

Chair: Maaike Koffeman, Radboud University

14 May 2021 Seminar Series: Crossover influences and local identities of the popular illustrated periodicals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

• Patrick Rössler (University of Erfurt), “From Simplicissimus to Simplicus and Der Simpl. Satire magazines between Nazi gleichschaltung and exile, 1934-35”
• Mary Ikoniadou (University of Central Lancashire), “Refugee publishing. The case study of the Greek political refugees in East Germany. Imaginings and aesthetics of repatriation amidst Cold War borders”

Chair: Andrés Mario Zervigón, Rutgers University

16 April 2021 Seminar Series: Crossover influences and local identities of the popular illustrated periodicals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

• Júlia Fazekas (ELTE University, Budapest), “Popularity of Hungarian and European fashion magazines in the 1840s”
• Charlotte Lauder (University of Strathclyde and National Library of Scotland), “Pithy people: the People’s Friend, a national magazine for Scotland”

Chair: Sophie Oliver, University of Liverpool

 

26 March 2021 Keynote Lecture

• Victoria Kuttainen (James Cook University, Australia): “Portholes, Channels, and Seductions: The Messy Affordances of Antipodean Periodical Scholarship”

Chair: Peter Buse, University of Liverpool University

The Twelfth International ESPRit Conference, themed "Periodicals: S.T.E.A.M. AHEAD!", successfully took place from 11-13 September 2024 at the Università degli Studi di Urbino Carlo Bo. The conference brought together scholars from around the world to explore the intersections of Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics (S.T.E.A.M.) in periodicals.

The event featured engaging presentations, discussions, and a special workshop for postgraduate students, along with guided city tours and museum visits. Participants reflected on the role of periodicals in the history of industrial and scientific revolutions, their materiality, and their impact on knowledge dissemination.

We extend our gratitude to all speakers, participants, and organizers for their contributions to this enriching academic exchange.

For those interested in the topics discussed, the conference program and related materials remain available. Please visit the conference website or contact the organizers at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. for further information.