Periodicals and Print Culture

The Periodicals and Print Culture Research Cluster was established in late 2010 as a means of bringing together and developing increasingly widespread interest in the School in the study of periodicals both as a necessary aspect of literary and historical studies, and as a developing and exciting research field in its own right.

The diversity of focus among the Cluster's members has created a proper context for cross-disciplinary study, and brought together scholars working across a wide historical range, with the main focus of interest in Victorian and Modernist publications. Members include Professor Peter Buse (photography magazines), Dr Kristin Ewins (women's modernism and periodicals), Dr Ben Harker (twentieth-century political radicalism and associated journalism), Dr Scott Thurston (contemporary experimental poetry magazines), Dr Janice Allan (literary reviews, constructions of value and serialized popular fiction in the nineteenth century), Margaret Beetham (Honorary Fellow, nineteenth-century women's periodicals, local Lancashire periodicals), Dr Carole O'Reilly (School of Arts & Media, Northwest England newspaper history).

Current Projects

We regularly host workshop events around specific periodicals and problems in periodicals studies. As a group we co-ordinate the Northwest Periodicals workshop, which moves between universities and draws on archives in the region. In 2012-13, there have been events at Salford (Working Class Movement Library), Liverpool John Moores (Jon Savage Archive), University of Central Lancashire (Livesey archive) and Manchester (Rylands – PN Review archive).

Members of the Cluster, along with scholars from Ghent University and Radboud University, Nijmegen, have been closely associated with the development of the European Society for Periodical Research (ESPRit) with the stated aim to bring together scholars from a range of disciplines working on periodicals across Europe. Kristin Ewins and Peter Buse sit on the Exec Committee of ESPRIT, and Margaret Beetham is on the Advisory Board. The Periodicals Cluster organised ESPRit’s inaugural conference, Periodicals Across Europe, on 9-10 December 2011 (part-funded by the Jean Monnet Centre for Excellence). The group is also hosting an ESPRit networking meeting in March 2013 at MCUK funded by a grant (£12, 092) from Nijmegen University.

Ewins has received a British Academy grant (£3,148) for her project on Women Writing Politics: Journalism by Women in the 1930s. Margaret Beetham is an Associate Editor of the Dictionary of Nineteenth Century Journalism in Great Britain and Northern Ireland (2009), a member of the Board of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals, and delivered the annual Wolff Lecture at RSVP in Austin, Texas in 2012.

Research Students

• Jen Morgan (Romantic radicalism and periodicals) 2010-14
• Matthew Kavanagh (twentieth-century periodicals and the CPGB) 2011-15
• Dr Annemarie McAllister (temperance periodicals) completed
• Dr Frank Murray (nineteenth-century working-men’s periodicals) completed

Key Publications

Allan, Janice, ‘The Contemporary Response.’ The Cambridge Companion to the Sensation Novel. Ed. Andrew Mangham. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, forthcoming 2013.

Beetham, Margaret, ‘Thinking back through our Mothers’ Magazines; Feminism’s Inheritance from Nineteenth-Century Magazines for Mothers’, Nineteenth Century Gender Studies. 6:2 (2010). http://www.ncgsjournal.com/issue62/beetham.htm

Beetham, Margaret, ‘Good Taste and Sweet Ordering: Dining with Mrs. Beeton’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 36 (2008): 391-406.

Buse, Peter, ‘Polaroid, Aperture, and Ansel Adams: rethinking the industry-aesthetic divide’, History of Photography 33: 4 (2009): 357-73.

Ewins, Kristin, 'A History of Fritillary: A Magazine of the Oxford Women's Colleges, 1894-1931', Notes & Queries 55.1 (2008): 60-64.

Harker, Ben, ‘“On different levels ourselves went forward ”: pageantry, class politics and narrative form in Virginia Woolf’s late writing.’ ELH 78 (2011): 433-56.

Forthcoming Events

The Cluster will be hosting the annual meetings of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals in July 2013.

They also form part of the organising committee for the 3rd ESPRit conference to be held at Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands, in early 2014.