Responsable scientifique : Françoise Baillet  

Currents in the Periodical Press

July 6-9, 2023, Caen, France.

Applications open on December 1, 2022 and are due 31 January 2023.

Access the conference website here

  We seek paper proposals on any topic related to the study of the periodical and newspaper press during the long nineteenth century in Great Britain and the British Empire, as well as in transatlantic and European contexts. We are particularly interested in receiving paper proposals that engage with the theme of currents – currency, undercurrents, and crosscurrents – in the Victorian periodical press. Held in Normandy, where history reverberated through local and global communities, the RSVP Conference in Caen invites scholars to consider currents in the Victorian periodical press. The conference topic invokes not only the news – the representation of current affairs and topicality in the press – but also issues relating to progress and change in periodical titles, themes, forms, and roles over time. We are also interested in the notion of currency in business, industry, and information, as well as in the actual financial workings of periodicals and publishers. Undercurrents and crosscurrents allude to divergences and convergences as well as trends and influences, both in the Victorian periodical press and in twenty-first-century periodicals scholarship.

Currents

• How do periodical forms – or their iterations across time and space – suggest notions of currents and flow?
• How are flows of information contained, redirected, or impeded by the periodical press?
• How are periodical rhythms altered by economics, taxes, the health of the editor, the vagaries of the marketplace, etc.?
• How was the experience of war and other current events in distant geographic locales represented and contested in the periodical press?
• How is our study of the periodical press informed by de-colonial, pan-European, and/or transatlantic currents and perspectives?
• How have recent advancements in digital remediation of periodicals and newspapers affected the way we conceive of global, regional, and local periodical discourse?

Currency

• How might the idea of currency influence our study of individual titles or particular formats (e.g., monthlies vs. weeklies)?
• How did worker strikes, trade embargoes, pandemics, new scientific ideas, agitations for equal rights, etc., influence the shape of the periodical press?
• How was this reflected in the starts, stops, and adaptations associated with particular periodical titles?
• How did the periodical press respond to/construct ideas of xenophobia and protectionism?

Undercurrents

• How is the “mainstream” in periodical publishing challenged or undergirded by divergent undercurrents/alternative publications from the resisting margins of counterculture (based on race, gender, sex, class, and locality), both within the UK and its colonies/dominions as well as across Europe and North America?
• How might Continental European and British periodical cultures be in synch or in oppositional relationship to each other?

Crosscurrents

• How might our scholarship engage with global economies, newspapers, travel, and international publication networks?
• How might it theorize crosscurrents between local and provincial papers, networks, and readerships?
• How are inclusion/exclusion, as well as differences in language and dialect (e.g., the representation of local/foreign accents), registered in the periodical press?

Hybrid Options

We plan to make plenaries and keynote addresses available in a hybrid format. We are also planning for a limited number of slots for remote presentations in a hybrid setup at the local conference. When submitting your abstract to the portal, an option for “remote presentation required” will be provided. If you have any questions regarding this hybrid option, please email the conference organizers. Download a PDF of this CFP here.