The 9th International ESPRit Conference on 'Periodical Formats in the Market: Economies of Space and Time, Competition and Transfer', which was supposed to be held in Bochum from 16-18 September 2020, has been postponed to 14-16 June 2021. 

Instead, we are organising an ESPRit annual meeting and a workshop on periodical studies on 17 September 2020 from 13:00 CET via Zoom. 

Programme

Times given are CET

13.00 — Annual general meeting (for registered ESPRit members)

14.00 — Opening, welcome, meet and greet 

14.30 — Postgraduate panel (Jennifer Buckley, Moritz Bauerfeind, Júlia Fazekas)

15.30 — WeChangEd stories app 

15.50 — Map of periodical studies

16.00 — ESPRit conference 2021

16.10 — Journal of European Periodical Studies

16.20 — Postgraduate panel (Jelena Lalatović, Marianne Noel)

17.00 — Closing remarks and social time

The Zoom link for this meeting will be circulated via e-mail.  Please contact us via This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. if you wish to participate.

The Journal of European Periodical Studies (JEPS) is a bi-annual, peer-reviewed online journal devoted to the study of periodicals and newspapers in Europe from the seventeenth century to the present. It publishes research from a broad range of critical, theoretical and methodological perspectives, including, but not limited to, cultural history, literary studies, art history, gender studies, media studies, history of science and digital humanities.

As the official journal of ESPRit, JEPS offers scholars a forum for sharing their research and exchanging ideas across disciplinary borders. Although the journal welcomes articles on any aspect of the European periodical press, it particularly encourages comparative contributions that take the study of periodical publication beyond linguistic, cultural and historical boundaries, explore new theoretical and methodological paths, and thereby open up new lines of scholarly inquiry.

JEPS is published in Open Access at Ghent University. Its editor-in-chief is Dr. Cedric van Dijck.

Recent issues of JEPS

Find out more by clicking on the titles:

• JEPS 9.2 (2024): Miscellaneous issue
• JEPS 9.1 (2024): Periodicals Beyond Hierarchies
• JEPS 8.2 (2023): Miscellaneous issue
• JEPS 8.1 (2023): The Matter of Europe
• JEPS 7.2 (2022): Periodical Formats in the Market
• JEPS 7.1 (2022): Miscellaneous issue
• JEPS 6.2 (2021): Modernity and National Identity in Popular Magazines
• JEPS 6.1 (2021): Women Editors in Europe
• JEPS 5.2 (2020): Independent Magazines Today
• JEPS 5.1 (2020): What is Popular? Studies on the Press in Inter-War Europe
• JEPS 4.2 (2019): Periodicals In-Between/Les Périodiques comme médiateurs
• JEPS 4.1 (2019): Digital Approaches Towards Serial Publications

Submissions & Contact

The editorial team of JEPS currently invites submissions for its Open Issue 10.2 (Winter 2025). Read the call for papers.

For more information about the journal, please visit the website by clicking here.

This Privacy Policy applies to information the European Society for Periodical Research collects about individuals who interact with our organisation. It explains what personal information we collect and how we use it. If you have any comments or questions about this notice, please feel free to contact us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Personal data we process

The following table explains the types of data we collect and the legal basis, under current data protection legislation, on which this data is processed.

How we use your data

We use your personal data to support our mission of providing an international network for periodical scholars. This includes:

• Replying to enquiries you send to us
• Contacting Listserv subscribers with information about ESPRit conferences
• Sending publication announcements on behalf of the Journal of European Periodical Studies
• Inviting registered ESPRit members to our annual business meeting
• Sending out invoices for membership fees through Paypal.

We will only use your data in a manner that is appropriate considering the basis on which that data was collected.

When we share your data

We will only pass your data to third parties in the following circumstances:

• you have provided your explicit consent for us to pass data to a named third party;
• we are using a third party purely for the purposes of processing data on our behalf and we have in place a data processing agreement with that third party that fulfils our legal obligations in relation to the use of third party data processors; or
• we are required by law to share your data.

In addition, we will only pass data to third parties outside of the EU where appropriate safeguards are in place as defined by Article 46 of the General Data Protection Regulation.

How long we keep your data

We take the principles of data minimisation and removal seriously and have internal policies in place to ensure that we only ever ask for the minimum amount of data for the associated purpose and delete that data promptly once it is no longer required.

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You are entitled to access, change, or delete the personal data that we hold. Please email your request to the ESPRit membership officer at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

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We maintain our member's personal information until cancellation of their membership. We take all reasonable precautions to protect these data against loss, theft, alteration, or destruction by using appropriate administrative, physical, and technical security measures.

Bild-Sequenzierung im Journal: Comic, Fotoreportage, Cinéroman und illustrierte Filmzeitschrift

12–13 June 2020, Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany

Organised by the DFG Research Unit 2288 Journal Literature, the Committee for Comics Studies and the Committee for Photography Studies at the German Society for Media Studies (GfM)

Confirmed Keynote Speakers: Jan Baetens (Leuven) and Marina Ortrud M. Hertrampf (Regensburg)

The premise of the workshop is that periodicals, as soon as they are capable of incorporating pictures, are prone to display not only single isolated, but most often multiple pictures and, moreover, arrange them in typical, possibly media-specific ways. The object of the workshop is to explore page layout strategies used in periodicals from the 19th to the 21st century in order to identify their manifestations, historical modifications and adaptations to different visual media.

From the late 19th century onwards photographic images have been published frequently in periodicals. As the 19th century drew to a close, photo-reproduction processes quickly supplanted wood-engraving. Photo-mechanical technologies such as the half-tone screen enabled mass reproduction of photographs. The importance of photojournalism and, accordingly, of photographic magazines such as the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung was increasing, leading to the formation of the influential journalistic genre of the ‘photo reportage’. American comic strips explored novel ways of “juxtapos[ing] pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer”, as Scott McCloud famously defined. Serial novels such as Georges Rodenbach’s Bruges-la-Morte (1892) were published AG Fotografieforschung accompanied by numerous photographs. After the turn of the century, the ever more popular medium of film found in the pages of the periodicals an ideal partner to transform its moving pictures into a fixed printed form. Throughout the 20th century these forms continued to flourish and develop, introducing new modes of serial picture display like the photonovel or the cinéroman up to current projects such as the Revue dessiné, offering a news magazine relying solely on comics. All of these forms raise the question how sequencing pictures on a page—and on ensuing pages—does produce meaning: How do still pictures narrate and produce visual discourse?

The workshop seeks to advance the study of image sequences from a transmedial perspective. The focus lies hereby on the way in which the medial format of the periodical operates with image sequences: How are images arranged and connected to each other, how do they produce coherence, the impression of a succession and very often even narrative cohesion? We welcome theoretical approaches as well as studies that work with historical or contemporary material.

Abstracts of no more than 300 words should be sent to the conference organisers Christian A. Bachmann, Vincent Fröhlich, Iris Haist, Jens Ruchatz, and Monika Schmitz-Emans (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) no later than 31 January 2020. Please include name, institutional affiliation, email address, and a short CV (150 words). This workshop seeks to advance transdisciplinary discussion and exchange. In line with this goal and the fact that the workshop encourages interaction, participants are required to submit preliminary papers of approximately 8 pages no later than 24 May 2020. Presentations should not exceed 10 minutes and should primarily serve to kick off discussions of 30 minutes. The papers will be sent to the attendees prior to the workshop and participants should read them in preparation of the discussions. The languages used during the workshop will be English and German. We will provide accommodation in Bochum and reimburse travel expenses up to €250 in total. Please add a short note to the abstract if you need us to refund costs up to €250. Please contact us no later than 24 May 2020 if you would like to participate in the discussion without presenting a paper.

Possible topics and case studies include but are not limited to:

• the formation of image sequences as part of an emerging practice of text production for periodicals from the late 19th century onwards;
• comic strips as image sequences and series of image sequences;
• image sequences as a mean of producing visual news in the ‘photo reportage’;
• the representation of film in periodicals using sequences of pictures;
• image sequences in periodicals as forms of remediation and/or negotiations of mediality;
• the intermedial structure of image sequences in photo comics, photonovels and film photonovels;
• mediations of and reflections on movement and time in image sequences published in periodicals.