Magazines on the Move: North American Periodicals and Travel
Friday 22nd September 2017, Nottingham Trent University, Clifton Campus

Seminar website

A one-day seminar hosted by the Centre for Travel Writing Studies, Nottingham Trent University, in collaboration with the Network for American Periodical Studies (rescheduled from June 2017).

Keynote speaker: Professor Andrew Thacker (Nottingham Trent University)
Organisers: Dr Victoria Bazin (Northumbria University); Dr Rebecca Butler (Nottingham Trent University); Dr Sue Currell (Sussex University); Prof Tim Youngs (Nottingham Trent University)
Confirmed speakers include Dr Claire Lindsay (UCL) and Dr Rachel Farebrother (Swansea University)

This day-seminar will focus on the relationship between North American travel writing and the periodical format. Its primary purpose is to facilitate historical and critical discussion of narratives of travel in North American periodicals.

We invite proposals for twenty-minute papers that examine accounts of travel to, within, or from North America, published in North American periodicals. We also welcome papers on periodicals and travel of Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean.

Topics to be examined in considering the interplay between the travel experience, the written and/or visual record of travel, and the periodical publication of the travel record, may include, but are not limited to:

• Commercial considerations
• Editorial policy and interventions
• Gender and sexuality
• Periodical context and design
• Purpose of travel
• ‘Race’
• Readership
• Solo or group travel
• Technologies of transport/mode of travel
• Tourism
• Visual representations

The seminar is a collaboration between Nottingham Trent’s Centre for Travel Writing Studies (CTWS) and the Network of American Periodical Studies (NAPS). It draws on the expertise of both research centres, as well as that of our keynote speaker, Professor Andrew Thacker (NTU), a specialist in modernist magazines and spatial geographies of modernism.

The Centre for Travel Writing Studies (CTWS) was established by Prof Tim Youngs (Nottingham Trent University) in 2002 to produce, facilitate, and promote scholarly research on travel writing and its contexts, without restriction of period, locus, or type of travel writing.

The Network of American Periodical Studies (NAPS) is a research initiative set up by Dr Sue Currell (Sussex University) and Dr Victoria Bazin (Northumbria University). It aims to bring together scholars working on American periodicals (magazines, newspapers and other periodical publications) from a range of historical periods and disciplines.

We welcome papers from scholars at any career stage and strongly encourage postgraduates to submit a proposal for consideration. Paper proposals of c200 words should be sent to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. by 28th July 2017. Early submission is advised.

With grateful thanks to the British Association for American Studies (BAAS) for financial support, we are now able to offer a limited number of travel bursaries and fee waivers for postgraduate students to attend. Priority will be given to those offering papers. Please state at the end of your proposal if you are a postgraduate wishing to apply for help towards costs.

Event website

Registration is now open for this one-day event at the British Library on 5 September 2017. There's a flat registration fee of £30 per delegate that includes lunch, conference packs, tea, coffee etc. The deadline for registration is 29^th August 2017.

Event Description

What do editors actually do? What makes a good editor? And more importantly, what makes a successful editor? From the Times Literary Supplement to Les Temps Modernes and Novyi Mir, from The Criterion to Die neue Rundschau and Spare Rib, there can be no doubting the influence of literary-intellectual magazines in selecting and shaping our cultural knowledge, our beliefs and values.

But we still know surprisingly little about how these crucial cultural institutions were led and managed and even how day-to-day editorial duties were undertaken in practice. Above all, we lack any kind of comparative perspective on the role of the periodical editor, both across national and historical boundaries and across different types of publications.

As part of the British Academy funded project, Editing the Twentieth Century, we address these issues during a one-day conference to be held at the British Library on 5 September 2017 exploring the key role played by the editors of periodical publications throughout the long twentieth century.

View the full conference programme here.

The Transnational American Periodical

A one day symposium at the British Library, London, 15 December 2017

in collaboration with the Network of American Periodical Studies

Plenary Speaker: Professor Janet Floyd (King’s College London)

Symposium website: here

The ‘transnational turn’ in American Studies can be understood as perhaps the most important reimagining of  the field since its inception; challenging Americanists to reevaluate disciplinary protocols, re-think their relationship to the region they study, and revise their intellectual and theoretical assumptions. For researchers of American print and periodical culture, this shift has often proved especially challenging; reliance on the work of Benedict Anderson and other scholarship on print and nationhood has led to a dominant view of the periodical as a space for imagining nationhood, or as a keystone of the modern nation state.

Against these arguments for periodicals as an instrument for building and imagining American nationhood, this symposium will explore how American periodicals and periodical literature, from the colonial period to the present day, has reached across borders to displace the nation as the primary site of belonging. The symposium will consider how American periodicals – as well as their editors, contributors, and readers – circulated across national boundaries, and the transnational networks that such circulation both relied upon and created. We invite papers that explore how changes in the material text, technologies and economies of print, reading publics, and distribution networks have shaped and reshaped transnational discourses and movements. We also welcome scholarship that examines how periodicals encouraged and sustained transnational identities within the United States itself, including periodicals aimed at immigrant and diasporic communities.

The symposium will also interrogate the relationship between theory and the archive that emerges from a transnational perspective on American periodicals. How does uncoveringthe material, economic, and social conditions of transnational periodical production and circulation encourage us to rethink theories of cosmopolitanism, the border, or the Black Atlantic? How can we write a transnational history of American periodicals using archives that were shaped in response to nation-centric models of cultural, political, and intellectual history? And how can theoretical approaches adapted from other disciplines inform our approach to and understanding of the transnational impact of American print?

Topics for papers may include:

• The circulation of US periodicals and periodical literature outside of the United States
• The circulation of non-US periodicals or the ethnic press in the United States
• Non-English periodicals or international editions of American periodicals
• American periodicals and transnational understandings of race, gender, and sexuality
• Transnational cultures of reprinting or collaboration
• American periodicals and the development of transnational networks
• Foreign correspondents and the American periodical
• Theoretical and methodological approaches to transnational periodical studies.
• The impact of archives, including digitization projects, on transnational approaches to United States periodicals
• American periodicals, transnationalism, and the digital age

We invite proposals for both individual papers, and for panels involving three or more participants. As well as traditional 20 minute papers, we welcome proposals for digital project showcases, roundtables, lightening papers, and other non-traditional formats.

We would like to thank BAAS, NAPS and the Eccles Centre at the British Library, whose generous support allows us to offer fee reductions and some travel funding for postgraduates, for early career scholars on hourly-paid or part time contracts, and for early career independent scholars. If you wish to be considered for travel funding, please include this information in your covering email, with an estimate of your travel costs.

Please send all proposals and any questions to the conference organizers Dr James West (University of Birmingham) and Dr Katie McGettigan (Royal Holloway, University of London) at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. by 15 September 2017. Decisions of acceptance will be made by 1 October 2017.

Call for Papers: The Thirteenth International Conference for Literary Journalism Studies (IALJS-13)

“Literary Journalism: Theory, Practice, Pedagogy”

Austrian Academy of Sciences Institute for Comparative Media and Communication Studies Vienna, Austria 17-19 May 2018

The International Association for Literary Journalism Studies invites submissions of original research papers, abstracts for research in progress and proposals for panels on Literary Journalism for the IALJS annual convention on 17-19 May 2018. The conference will be held at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna, Austria.

The conference hopes to be a forum for scholarly work of both breadth and depth in the field of literary journalism, and all research methodologies are welcome, as are research on all aspects of literary journalism and/or literary reportage. For the purpose of scholarly delineation, our definition of literary journalism is "journalism as literature" rather than "journalism about literature." The association especially hopes to receive papers related to the general conference theme, “Literary Journalism: Theory, Practice, Pedagogy." All submissions must be in English.

The International Association for Literary Journalism Studies is a multi-disciplinary learned society whose essential purpose is the encouragement and improvement of scholarly research and education in Literary Journalism. As an association in a relatively recently defined field of academic study, it is our agreed intent to be both explicitly inclusive and warmly supportive of a variety of scholarly approaches.

Details of the programs of previous annual meetings can be found here.

I. Guidelines for Research Papers

Submitted research papers should not exceed 7,500 words, or about 25 double-spaced pages, plus endnotes. Please regard this as an upper limit; shorter papers are certainly welcome. Endnotes and bibliographic citations should follow the Chicago Manual of Style. Papers may not be simultaneously submitted to any other conferences. Papers previously published, presented, accepted or under review are ineligible. Only one paper per author will be accepted for presentation in the conference’s research sessions, and at least one author for each paper must be at the convention in order to present the paper. If accepted, each paper presenter at a conference Research Session may be allotted no more than 15 minutes. To be considered, please observe the following guidelines:

1. Submission by e-mail attachment in MS Word is required. No other format or faxes or postal mail submissions will be accepted.
2. Include one separate title page containing title, author/s, affiliation/s, and the address, phone, fax, and e-mail of the lead author.
3. Also include a second title page containing only the paper’s title and the paper’s abstract. The abstract should be approximately 250 words in length.
4. Your name and affiliation should /not/ appear anywhere in the paper [this information will only appear on the first title page; see (b) above].

II. Guidelines for Work-in-Progress Presentations (Abstracts)

Submitted abstracts for Work-in-Progress Sessions should not exceed 250 words. If accepted, each presenter at a conference Work-in-Progress session may be allotted no more than 10 minutes. To be considered, please observe the following guidelines:

1. Submission by e-mail attachment using MS Word is required. No other format or faxes or postal mail submissions will be accepted.
2. Include one separate title page containing title, author/s, affiliation/s, and the address, phone, fax and e-mail of the lead author.
3. Also include a second page containing only the work’s title and the actual abstract of the work-in-progress. The abstract should be approximately 250 words in length.

III. Guidelines for Proposals for Panels

1. Submission by e-mail attachment in MS Word is required. No other format or faxes or postal mail submissions will be accepted.
2. Panel proposals should contain the panel title, possible participants and their affiliation and e-mail addresses, and a description of the panel’s subject. The description should be approximately 250 words in length.
3. Panels are encouraged on any topic related to the study, teaching or practice of literary journalism. See http://www.ialjs.org/?page_id=21 

IV. Evaluation Criteria, Deadlines and Contact Information

All research paper submissions will be evaluated on originality and importance of topic; literature review; clarity of research purpose; focus; use of original and primary sources and how they support the paper’s purpose and conclusions; writing quality and organization; and the degree to which the paper contributes to the study of literary journalism. Similarly, abstracts of works-in-progress and panel proposals will be evaluated on the degree to which they contribute to the study of literary journalism. All submissions will be blind-juried, and submissions from students as well as faculty are encouraged.

Please submit research papers or abstracts of works-in-progress presentations to:

Prof. Tobias Eberwein, Austrian Academy of Sciences (Austria) IALJS Research Chair; e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. 

Please submit proposals for panels to:

Prof. Rob Alexander, Brock University (Canada) IALJS Program Co-Chair; e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. 

Deadline for all submissions: No later than 1 December 2017

For more information regarding the conference or the association, please go to http://www.ialjs.org or contact:

Prof. Isabel Soares, Universidade de Lisboa (Portugal) IALJS President; e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. 

Prof. Thomas Connery, University of St. Thomas (U.S.A.) IALJS First Vice President; e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>

Prof. Bill Reynolds, Ryerson University (Canada) IALJS Treasurer; e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. 

Prof. David Abrahamson, Northwestern University (U.S.A.) IALJS Secretary;e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. 

Prof. John S. Bak, Université de Lorraine (France) Founding IALJS President; e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. 

NOTE: Submissions from students are encouraged, and a competitive Student Travel Fund has been established to assist in funding student travel. Applications will be available upon acceptance of submission.