ESPRit ‘Periodicals and the Law’ Network (P&LN) online seminar series

This seminar series will initially be organised during the 2023-2024 academic year by Aled Jones and Gioula Koutsopanagou, supported by a sub-group comprising Mara Logaldo and Nora Ramtke. 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.

P&L Seminar 1: 17 November 2023, 3pm CET (chair: Aled Jones)

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)”

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.

Jelena Lalatović is a Belgrade-based researcher. She obtained her PhD having defended a thesis entitled ‘The Genres of Literary Criticism and Polemic in the Student Periodical Press: the Oppositional Public Sphere from 1937 to 1968’ at the University of Belgrade. She is currently working on a monograph based on the doctoral research. Along with Dr Dario Boemia she has been organizing a conference ‘Between Distant and Close Reading: Periodical Studies and Humanities in the 21st Century’. Her field of interest includes cultural and literary studies, as well as political and intellectual history, and its impact on literature. She works as a research assistant at the Institute for Literature and Art.

MICHAEL LÖRCH (Researcher and translator): “Decentralized Censorship in a Centralized State: The ‘Guidance and Control’ of Scholarly Periodicals in the German Democratic Republic”

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.

Michael Lörch is a researcher and translator based in Strasbourg, France. He recently finished his PhD thesis under the title of The Politics of the Scholarly Journal: The Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik (ZAA) as a Link between Academia, Publishing Industry and Politics. He is currently working on a monograph based on the doctoral research and an article on the Anglophone Press in 19^th-century Germany. He worked as research assistant at the Germersheim Campus of the Johannes-Gutenberg University Mainz. His fields of interest include periodical studies and the role of politics and economics in modern and contemporary North American literature.

P&L Seminar 2: 19 December 2023, 6pm CET (chair: Aled Jones)

ANDREW KING (University of Greenwich): ‘Beyond the Taxes on Knowledge: the Law and the 1860s English Press’

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.

Andrew King is Professor of English at the University of Greenwich, London. He was the founding editor of Victorian Popular Fictions and is the author or editor of 8 books and many articles on the nineteenth-century press and popular fiction, most recently Work and the Nineteenth-Century Press (2022). He's currently working on a chapter on the global economics of the periodical and a 4-volume collection of annotated primary sources with Marysa Demoor, Andrew Hobbs and Lisa Peters on Geographies of the Press. This seminar paper comes out of a chapter he's written for a volume on the 1860s edited by Pamela Gilbert coming out from CUP in 2024.

ANN HALE (British and Irish Legal Information Institute): ‘Business Matters: Examining Legal Frameworks Underpinning the Periodical Press’

The legal structures underpinning the business entities that make up the periodical press receive little scholarly attention, yet every entity associated with the press takes a particular legal form, and forms can change over time. Reading across single or multiple enterprises can reconceptualize how the press was organized and who participated in it. This presentation suggests an approach for examining legal frameworks and provides an overview of key subjects to keep in mind. Inspired by Linda K. Hughes’s “sideways” approach to print culture, it reads across multiple enterprises, legal entities, and intersecting networks linked to George Newnes (1851–1910), the publisher of influential general-audience periodicals such as Tit-Bits (1881–1985), a penny weekly, and the Strand Magazine (1891–1950), an illustrated monthly. While the example entities are rooted in the common law, Britain, and the 1890s, the approach and underlying concepts are broadly applicable to other jurisdictions and entities. 

Ann M. Hale is an independent scholar and the Executive Director of the British and Irish Legal Information Institute (BAILII). She completed her PhD at the University of Greenwich in 2020, and her thesis, “Business Matters: Legal Structures, Roles, People, and Places in the Nineteenth-Century Press—A Case Study of George Newnes Limited,” was awarded RSVP’s inaugural 2021 Sally Mitchell Dissertation Prize.

P&L Seminar 3: 24 April 2024, 17:00 CET (Chair: Andrew King)  

WILL SLAUTER (Sorbonne Université): “Periodicals and the Right to Copy: Copyright Exceptions for the Press Before and After the Berne Convention (1886)”

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.

Will Slauter is a professor in the English department at Sorbonne Université, where he teaches primarily United States history. His publications include the monograph Who Owns the News? A History of Copyright (Stanford, 2019), a special issue of Victorian Periodicals Review on copyright and the 19th-century British press (Winter 2018), and the open-access volume Circulation and Control: Artistic Culture and Intellectual Property in the Nineteenth Century, co-edited with Marie-Stéphanie Delamaire (Open Book Publishers, 2021).

P&L Seminar 4: 28 May 2024, 17:00 CET (Chair: Elena Ogliari) 

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’

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'

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 5: 2 October 2024, 13:00 CET (Chair: Cedric Van Dijck)

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.

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.

This series of work-in-progress sessions will be led by colleagues contributing to the Brill Handbook of Transnational Periodical Research, edited by Marianne Van Remoortel and Fionnuala Dillane, which is planned for publication in 2025. Seminar participants will each speak for 8-10 minutes on the challenges of ‘transnational’ work and on questions that their work-in-progress has raised to date. The workshops aim to deepen and enrich understandings of what we mean by transnational periodical research, including considerations of the usefulness and limitations of the ‘transnational’. As work-in-progress sessions, we also hope to open up discussions about our methodologies and strategies as periodical researchers. Each session will be one hour long, conversational in format, and audience participation will be encouraged. Each workshop will be held on zoom and registration links are included below. We look forward to seeing you and to the ongoing discussions.

Work-in-Progress Workshop 1 

Monday 25 September, 5pm-6pm CET with

• Gábor Dobó and Merse Szeredi (Petőfi Literary Museum–Kassák Museum, Budapest) on Networks and the Avant-Garde
• Henriette Partzsch (University of Glasgow) on Translation and Genres
• Marguérite Corporaal (Radboud University) on Travelling Localism

Work-in-Progress Workshop 2 

Monday 2 Oct 5pm-6pm CET with

• Cedric van Dijck (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) on Empire
• Stephan Pigeon (St Francis Xavier University, New Brunswick) on Scissors and Paste
• Sukeshi Kamra (Carleton University, Ottawa) on Postcolonialism/Transimperialism

Work-in-Progress Workshop 3 

Tuesday 10 October 4pm-5pm CET

• Sophie van den Elzen (Utrecht University) on Rebels
• Sara Marzagora and Malak Abdelkhalek (King’s College London) on Internationalism, Solidarity and Pedagogy

We are inviting you to an online seminar on Friday, 12 January 2024, at 12.30pm CET. The seminar will feature the following papers:

Dr Andrew Hobbs (University of Central Lancashire, UK): “Regional Magazines: A research Agenda”

What happens to our idea of the magazine when we take it out of the city and into the provinces? This paper raises some research questions about magazines focused not on the international, the national or the local, but on those administrative units in between: county, province, region, oblast, canton, département, voivodeship, federal state, Bundesland, etc. Are such markets too small? Is the academic market for a study of regional magazines too small? – are there too few to be worth studying? In fact, how many are there? If magazines are modern, can the modern happen outside the city? Is the regional always middlebrow? Can a magazine be radical whilst regional? If Raymond Williams was right in seeing ‘regional’ and ‘provincial’ as value-laden metropolitan ideological constructions, what does that mean for the regional magazine? How does magazine publishing relate to these sub-national administrative territories? Do such territories have an imaginary, a distinctive culture, or are they purely administrative? This paper considers some of these questions with a case study of the twentieth-century English county magazine as a genre, analysing its techniques for exploiting county identity.

Dr Andrew Hobbs is a senior lecturer in journalism at the University of Central Lancashire, UK, a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a former journalist. He is interested in provincial print cultures and sense of place, particularly nineteenth-century local newspapers and twentieth-century county magazines. His open-access book A Fleet Street in Every Town: The Provincial Press in England, 1855-1900 (Open Book, 2018) won the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals 2019 Colby book prize. His work on provincial magazines includes ‘Lancashire Life Magazine, 1947–73: A Middle-Class Sense of Place’, Twentieth Century British History 24:3 (2013) and ‘Cheshire Life, 1934-39: The Birth of the Modern County Magazine’, Manchester Region History Review 2 (new series, 2023).

Dr Fabio Guidali (Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy): “When Politics Meddles in: Local Identities in the Case of Northern League’s Weekly Sole delle Alpi”

The Lega Nord (Northern League, today Lega) is currently the Italian political party with the longest history, having emerged as one of the many independence movements that established themselves globally in the last two decades of the twentieth century. Attentive to Northern Italian localisms as opposed to the central bureaucracy of the state and its supposed “southern” character, in the late 1990s the Northern League became an amplifier of the crisis that the parties had been experiencing for years and contributed to the weakening of the political system. In the second half of the decade, the Northern League claimed for a phantom new state called “Padania”, understood as a multi-regional community held together by a common culture and even by supposed common ethnic roots (Celtic or at any rate “barbarian” and Northern European, not “Italic”). It thus gave birth, among other editorial products, to a weekly called Sole delle Alpi (Sun of the Alps), a current affairs magazine which, in addition to politics and society, dealt also with regional customs, trying to build a pool of references to a “Po Valley” culture(“padanista”).
The paper presents this periodical, which appears interesting, though not necessarily indicative of a trend, given its political uniqueness. It highlights the lowbrow character of the publication (which sought to mimic the anti-elitist and anti-intellectual character of the party), its radical and anti-modern political approach, its lack of market success, its focus on very narrow local cultures and a plural regional identity, and, at the same time, its exploitation of the territory also for tourism purposes.

Dr Fabio Guidali is a research fellow in Contemporary History at the University of Milan. He investigates the history of intellectuals and culture in twentieth-century Europe, with particular attention to associations, networks and forms of political commitment. His research also focuses on the history of journalism and on the popular press. He is the author of two intellectual biographies (Il secolo lungo di Gabriele Mucchi. Una biografia intellettuale e politica, 2012, and Un intellettuale europeo. Umberto Campagnolo tra antifascismo e guerra fredda, 2023) and of a monograph on intellectuals’ political engagement (Scrivere con il mondo in testa. Intellettuali europei tra cultura e potere, 2016). He is local scientific coordinator of a national project on discrimination in post-war Italian newspapers (Lingua e storia della discriminazione nei giornali dell’Italia contemporanea, PRIN 2022) and member of the advisory board of ESPRit.

The seminar will be held online. Please register below if you wish to receive the Zoom link. 

Edinburgh Companion to First World War Periodicals
Book Launch, 15 May 2023

Hoek 38 (Leuvenseweg 38, 1000 Brussels) or online (MS Teams)
13:00: Walk-in with coffee
13:30: Welcome by Prof. Marysa Demoor (UGent)
13:40: ‘From War Literature to Literate War: What Periodicals Tell Us About the First
World War,’ keynote by Prof. Pierre Purseigle (Warwick University and Francqui
Chair at VUB)
14:50: ‘First World War, Periodicals and the Everyday,’ roundtable with Dr. Dominiek
Dendooven (In Flanders Fields Museum), Prof. Nel de Mûelenaere (VUB), Prof.
Ann-Marie Einhaus (Northumbria University), Prof. Pierre Purseigle (Warwick
University) and Prof. Antoon Vrints (UGent). Moderated by Prof. Birgit Van
Puymbroeck (VUB)
16:30: Reception
All are welcome. Please register before 7 May at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. (indicating
if you will attend in person or online). When following online, please note that all
times are indicated in CEST (GMT+2).