e are happy to announce the 12th annual conference of the European Society for Periodical Research (ESPRit), which might be interesting especially for Victorianists. Since its inception in 2009, ESPRit is affiliated with the Research Society for Periodicals (RSVP) and offers a forum to discuss research on Victorian Periodicals within a broader European community.
In periodicals, the fields of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (S.T.E.M) and the Arts are imbricated with one another (S.T.E.A.M.) in both material and theoretical terms. The history of journals and magazines runs parallel to the industrial and scientific revolutions. These revolutions have found a privileged place of diffusion in periodicals thanks to the timeliness of information, flexibility of content, easy diffusion and prompt response to the dialogues and controversies reflected within them. Technological progress has shaped the materiality of periodicals, including the type of paper, graphic design and technologies for the reproduction of both text and images.
One of the aims of the conference is to reflect on how periodicals popularized and transformed the new technologies, visual culture, and scientific discoveries within a context of permanent change in the models of cultural and social organization, with special attention given to the role that images and texts played in the diffusion of scientific ideas and the presentation of technological innovations. We also invite reflection on the role of periodicals in the development of disciplines: we are interested in how periodicals both establish and collapse borders between the humanities, arts, technologies, and the sciences. For example, we welcome contributions from a historical, modernist or decolonial perspective, as well as with a focus on recent challenges posed by the rise of digitization, open access publishing, and Artificial Intelligence.
A full conference CFP can be found here: https://www.espr-it.eu/news/events
For any inquiries please contact the conference organiser Carlotta Castellani (Università degli Studi di Urbino Carlo Bo): ESPRit24@uniurb.it
Created 22 December 2023