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 21 February 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 “Re-orienting Assemblage Theory in Anglophone Literature and Culture (https://literaryassemblage.com/%26amp;sa%3DD%26amp;source%3Deditors%26amp;ust%3D1716372637166674%26amp;usg%3DAOvVaw1i5zMg0PH7wbQ-XJ3UKUtn&sa=D&source=docs&ust=1716372637171108&usg=AOvVaw0V8LIdJ_1h8vseBcFjsVO9">RELY)”, 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

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

Mercredi 7 février, Bibliothèque Jacques Seebacher, Université Paris Cité, Campus des Grands Moulins, 5 rue Thomas Mann, 75013 Paris, bâtiment A, 2^e étage, 16h-19h

 Nathalie Simonnot (chercheur du ministère de la Culture, directrice du laboratoire de recherche de l’École nationale supérieure d’architecture de Versailles) : « Les revues muséales : un objet de recherche polymorphe »/ « Museum magazines: a polymorphous object of research »

Les revues muséales forment un domaine de recherche encore lacunaire dû à leur typologie hybride, à la confluence entre revue d’art, revue de technique et revue d’actualité professionnelle. Destinées aux conservateurs des musées, elles rendent compte de l’état des collections, des acquisitions et des aménagements réalisés. À vocation à la fois théorique, pratique et didactique, elles sont un support majeur pour assurer la diffusion de l’actualité muséale. Cette conférence sera centrée sur les revues muséales françaises au lendemain de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, au moment où les contenus et les formats de ces revues ont évolué pour accompagner le renouveau des musées pendant la Reconstruction. En expérimentant plusieurs formules éditoriales dans un laps de temps parfois très court, ces revues sont passées pour certaines d’un simple bulletin de quelques pages à de véritables revues professionnelles. Cette étude permet de contribuer à une histoire des acteurs, des réseaux professionnels, des expériences muséographiques et de leurs modes de diffusion dans la presse spécialisée. En fournissant quantité d’images d’intérieurs aujourd’hui disparus, ces revues retracent une certaine idée du musée et de ses missions. Petits et grands musées s’y côtoient, quel que soit leur statut, dans un élan général faisant des innombrables contributions des conservateurs qui y publient – plusieurs centaines d’articles et de documents graphiques – un corpus hors du commun pour comprendre l’esprit d’une époque.

Museum magazines form a field of research that is still incomplete, due to their hybrid typology, at the confluence of art magazines, technical magazines and professional news magazines. Intended for museum curators, they report on the state of collections, acquisitions and new developments. Theoretical, practical and didactic, they are a major medium for disseminating museum news. This conference will focus on French museum magazines in the aftermath of the Second World War, at a time when the content and formats of these magazines evolved to accompany the renewal of museums during Reconstruction. By experimenting with different editorial formulas in what was sometimes a very short space of time, some of these magazines evolved from a simple bulletin of a few pages to fully-fledged professional journals. This study contributes to a history of the players, professional networks, museographic experiences and their modes of dissemination in the specialized press. By providing a wealth of images of interiors that have now disappeared, these magazines trace a certain idea of the museum and its missions. Small and large museums, whatever their status, rub shoulders in a general momentum that makes the countless contributions of the curators who publish in them - several hundred articles and graphic documents - an outstanding corpus for understanding the spirit of an era.

Paul Edwards (Université Paris Cité, LARCA) : « Revues photographiques et sociétés photographiques autour de 1900 : la photolittérature, le spectacle et la socialisation »/ « Photographic magazines and photographic societies around 1900: photoliterature, spectacle and socialization »

This paper explains how French photoliterature could appear in the 1890s not only as a crafted, bibliophilic object involving multiple participants but also as an activity of cultural distinction within the socialising practices of provincial photographic societies, in close relation to the ritual of lantern-slide story-telling, at a time immediately preceding the birth of cinema (1895) when there was already an interest in the narrative power of serial photography and what might be called the “kinetic” effect of juxtaposed images on the page. This paper also shows how literary illustrations could double as architectural views that provided documentary evidence of a cultural heritage that was perceived as fragile and in need of preservation, since the members of photo clubs were leisured amateurs who participated actively in different cultural and patrimonial associations. Drawing on local photography club journals, national photography magazines, and recently discovered correspondence, this paper aims to show how photoliterature was collectively produced within a context of bourgeois sociability in a quest for cultural distinction and social recognition at a time when photography was popularly associated with commerce, industry and science, not with fine art and culture; it will show how it forms a continuum with photo-club activities, and that the historical interest of these productions today lies not only in their witty reinterpretations of popular literature, but in what they reveal about photography’s social function. 

La séance sera accessible également en ligne. Les demandes d’inscription pour la séance en ligne sont à adresser à This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. et This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

The session will also be available online. Requests to register for the online session should be sent to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Organisateurs/organizers :

Hélène Védrine (Sorbonne Université, CELLF 19-21)

Norbert Verdier (Paris-Saclay, EST-GHDSO)

Alexia Kalantzis (UVSQ, CHCSC & Université Paris Cité, CERILAC)

Comité scientifique/scientific committee :

Jean-Charles Geslot (UVSQ, CHCSC)

Axel Hohnsbein (Université de Bordeaux, SPH)

Alexia Kalantzis (UVSQ, CHCSC & Université Paris Cité, CERILAC)

Catherine Radtka (CNAM PARIS, HT2S)

Viera Rebolledo-Dhuin (UPEC, CRHEC)

Evanghelia Stead (UVSQ, CHCSC)

Hélène Védrine (Paris-Sorbonne, CELLF 19-21)

Norbert Verdier (GHDSO/EST)

Contacts :

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Label MSH Paris-Saclay & CELLF 19-21