Periodicals
Periodicals
About this Cluster
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The Periodicals 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.
The Cluster is led by Professor Peter Buse (history of photography and cinema) and includes Dr Kristin Ewins (women’s writing, modernism and periodicals); Professor Brian Maidment (nineteenth-century periodicals, especially illustration and artisan journals); Dr Ben Harker (twentieth-century political radicalism and associated journalism); Dr Scott Thurston (contemporary experimental poetry magazines) and Dr Janice Allan (serialised popular fiction in the nineteenth century) from among current academic staff in English. Details of the academic profile of all these members is available on the Salford SEEK website and in the individual statements below. As well as current staff, the Cluster has a number of associated contributors, among them Margaret Beetham (nineteenth-century women’s periodicals) and Dr Carole O’Reilly, current and recent doctoral students Jen Morgan (Romantic radicalism and periodicals), Matthew Kavanagh (twentieth-century periodicals and the CPGB), Dr Annemarie McAllister and Dr Frank Murray (periodicals and the nineteenth-century temperance movement).
The Cluster builds on strong links with both established and emerging scholarly organisations for the study of periodicals. Brian Maidment is a member of the Executive Committee of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP), and on the Editorial Board of Victorian Periodicals Review, and has spoken at many RSVP conferences. 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. The Periodicals Cluster at Salford organised ESPRit’s inaugural conference, Periodicals Across Europe, on 9-10 December 2011. The continuing development of ESPRit will form one of the Cluster’s central activities over the next few years.
Events
The first in a series of workshops on periodical studies organised by the Cluster will be held on Friday 25 May, 2-4 pm, in the NALGO room of the Working Class Movement Library right next to the University on the Crescent in Salford: http://www.wcml.org.uk/. The venue is very close to Salford Crescent train station, so very easy to reach by public transport. Leading the workshop will be Kristin Ewins and Jen Morgan, both of the University of Salford. Kristin has been awarded a British Academy grant to work on women’s journalism of the 1930s, and will be exploring some of the challenges of this research in her contribution. Jen currently holds an AHRC collaborative doctoral award with the Working Class Movement Library and the English Literature group at Salford University. Drawing on some of the library’s own holdings, Jen will be talking about the Owenite socialist and Chartist press. For more information, and to indicate your attendance, please email Peter Buse at p.buse1@salford.ac.uk.
On 28 March 2012 Professor Ian Haywood of Roehampton University delivered a paper on nineteenth-century periodicals at Salford. 
The Periodicals Research Cluster organised the international conference Periodicals Across Europe conference, in December 2011, at The Burgess Foundation, Manchester. Our acclaimed keynote lectures were delivered by Professor Sophie Levie (Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen) and Dr Sascha Bru (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven). The conference was organised to mark the foundation of the European Society for Periodical Research (ESPRit), and took as its theme the comparative study of European periodicals and periodical cultures. Please visit the Periodicals Across Europe page for the conference website, where you can read a full report..
Dr Jim Mussell from the University of Birmingham visited Salford on 13 April 2011 to give a paper on the implications of electronic resources for periodicals research.
Dr Faye Hammill from the University of Strathclyde gave a paper as part of the Periodicals Research Cluster’s series of seminars on 9 February 2011. Her topic was ‘Sophistication, Modernity and American Magazines’.
The founding of the Periodicals Research Cluster was prefigured by a day-long workshop held in June 2010 and organised by Peter Buse and Kristin Ewins. The workshop brought together over twenty staff from Salford and neighbouring institutions, and, using ‘hands-on’ group work led by a range of contributors, engaged participants of varying experience in working through some of the issues involved in ‘reading’ periodicals. In the lively and collaborative environment which the day provided, the topics discussed included editorial and production processes, regulation, frequency, readerships, distribution, seriality, contributors and price. It was the success of the workshop as well as the varied and engaged group of participants it attracted, that suggested the formalisation of the group as a Periodicals Research Cluster.
In November 2009 Brian Maidment gave the keynote address at a conference called ‘The British Punch Magazine as a Transcultural Format of Satire and Caricature’ organised by the ‘Asia and Europe in a Global Context’ research centre at Heidelberg University. The conference drew together a range of specialists interested in satire and satirical journals in countries as varied as Japan, India and Egypt. The papers given at the conference have been developed into a substantial volume, which will be published in 2011. The resultant book will offer a rare comparative approach to a periodical form.
Projects
Members of the Cluster are engaged with a number of funded projects that engage centrally with periodicals. Ben Harker is the lead investigator in a Collaborative Doctoral Award project undertaken between Salford and the Working Class Movement Library. The project, which was awarded £237,000 by the AHRC, has established three doctoral studentships which will focus on engagement with the cultural concerns of working-class movements from Chartism to post-war British trade unionism. All three will be heavily dependent on the study of periodical literature, and draw extensively on the magnificent holdings of the Working Class Movement Library, which is located adjacent to the main Salford campus. Kristin Ewins currently holds a Vice Chancellor’s Early Career Research scholarship for work on women’s involvement in early twentieth-century periodicals, and she has been awarded a British Academy Small Research Grant to fund her project ‘Women Writing Politics: Journalism by Women in the 1930s’. Peter Buse’s work on Polaroid photography has been recently supported by awards from the AHRC, the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust which have allowed him to make extensive use of Polaroid archives in Harvard, with special reference to photographic trade journals. Brian Maidment is currently editing a special issue of Victorian Periodicals Review on the 1820s and 1830s.
The recently published Dictionary of Nineteenth Century Journalism under the general editorship of Marysa Demoor and Laurel Brake and published in 2009 in print form by the British Library and Academia and online by Proquest, contained a substantial Salford contribution. Brian Maidment was one of the Associate Editors and a major contributor, while two other contributors, Annemarie McAllister and Frank Murray, completed doctorates at Salford within the recent past. Frank Murray’s PhD was a detailed study of The British Workman, one of the longest lived and most interesting Victorian illustrated cheap journals aimed at an artisan readership. Annemarie McAllister’s dissertation, subsequently revised and published in book form, was a study of representations of Italians in British nineteenth-century culture, and focussed on the ways in which The Illustrated London News reported and discussed Italian affairs.
Key publications and conference papers
Full details of staff publications and conference papers can be found on SEEK. The following list includes recent work that bears directly on the Cluster’s academic interests:
Margaret Beetham
Magazine of Her Own?: Domesticity and Desire in the Woman’s Magazine, 1800-1914. London: Routledge, 1996.
Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland. Ed. Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor; associate editors, Margaret Beetham, Brian Maidment, et al. Gent: Academia Press; London: British Library, 2009.
New Woman Hybridities: Femininity, Feminism and International Consumer Culture, 1880-1930. Ed. Ann Heilmann and Margaret Beetham. London: Routledge, 2004.
Victorian Periodicals Hypertext Project. Ed. Lorna Hughes and Stuart Lee. Oxford: Centre for Textual Studies, Oxford University Computing Services, 1994.
Victorian Women’s Magazines: An Anthology. Ed. Margaret Beetham and Kay Boardman. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2001.
Peter Buse
‘Polaroid, Aperture, and Ansel Adams: rethinking the industry-aesthetic divide.’ History of Photography 33 4 (2009): 357-73.
‘Surely Fades Away: Polaroid photography and the contradictions of cultural value.’ Photographies 1.2 (2008): 221-38.
‘Tel Quel in Manhattan.’ Nottingham French Studies 44.3 (Autumn 2005): 69-82.
Kristin Ewins
‘A History of Fritillary: A Magazine of the Oxford Women’s Colleges 1894-1931.’ Notes and Queries 55.1 (2008): 60-64.
‘The Question of Socialist Fiction and Sylvia Townsend Warner in the Thirties.’ Literature Compass 5.3 (2008): 657-67.
Brian Maidment
‘Dinners or Desserts? – Miscellaneity, Knowledge and Illustration in Magazines of the 1820s and 1830s.’ Victorian Periodicals Review 43.4 (Winter 2010): 353-87.
‘Serials, Journals and Magazines 1780-1830.’ The Cambridge History of the Book 1660-1830. Ed. M. Suarez and M. Turner. Cambridge: CUP, 2009. 498-512.
‘Subversive Supplements - Satirical Magazine Title Pages in the 1830s.’ Victorian Periodicals Review 43.2 (Summer 2010): 133-45.
Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland. Ed. Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor; associate editors, Margaret Beetham, Brian Maidment, et al. Gent: Academia Press; London: British Library, 2009. Associate editor and author of over 100 entries mainly on illustration, artists and artisan journals.
‘The Illuminated Magazine and the Triumph of Wood Engraving.’ The Lure of Illustration in the Nineteenth Century – Picture and Press. Ed. Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 17-39.
‘An Image of 1848: Reportage, Caricature and Kenny Meadows’s “Dram Drinker.”’ 1848 – The Year the World Turned? Ed. Kay Boardman and Christine Kinealy. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007. 190-210.
Individual profiles
Peter Buse
My research on the cultural history of Polaroid photography draws heavily on the photographic periodicals of the post-WWII era, both art based (Aperture, Close-Up) and hobbyist (Popular Photography, British Journal of Photography). I am particularly interested in the ways in which those periodicals are instrumental in shaping cultural and aesthetic values with regards to Polaroid photography. I’ve also writtren in the past on the French avant-garde journal Tel Quel.
Kristin Ewins
My work centres on women writers in the first half of the twentieth century, and especially the presence of women in modernist magazine culture, which constitutes the field of my current Early Career Research Fellowship at Salford. For instance, I spoke on ‘Modern Women and Periodical Culture in 1910’ at the ‘1910 Centenary Conference’ held at Glasgow University late in 2010.
Ben Harker
Periodicals are central to my research, which primarily focuses on culture and the British Left. In my forthcoming book, co-edited with John Callaghan, Communism in Britain: A Documentary History (Manchester U.P. 2011), the large network of periodicals established by the CPGB is a key resource. In my forthcoming monograph, Cultural Communism, the CPGB’s cultural periodicals are both a resource and a subject of enquiry. CP-dominated journals Our Time and Left Review, as well as periodicals created by the New Left, are central to my ongoing research on leftist intellectuals including Edgell Rickword, Ewan MacColl and Raymond Williams. I also use periodicals extensively in my teaching at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels.
Matthew Kavanagh
I began my research, funded by the AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award, in October 2011. The project is a collaboration between the University of Salford and the city’s Working Class Movement Library (WCML). I am examining the relationship between the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and culture in Britain between 1935 and c1950, using the WCML’s extensive collection of communist linked journals from the period: Left News, Left Review, Our Time and Modern Quarterly. The period between the Popular Front and the onset of the Cold War was one of unprecedented interaction between the CPGB and British cultural and intellectual figures, and journals were central to this dialogue. By using journals as a primary source, it is hoped that this research will enrich our understanding of the relationship between British culture and the CPGB ‘line’ in the period prescribed.
Brian Maidment
Brian Maidment has a well established international reputation for his work on Victorian periodicals. He is a member of the Executive of the American based Research Society for Victorian Periodicals, and on the editorial board of its international journal Victorian Periodicals Review. Several of his essays have appeared recently in VPR, including a lengthy study of ‘information miscellanies’ in the 1820s and 1830s. He has spoken many times at the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP) conferences in Britain, America and Continental Europe, and gave the Society’s Wolff Lecture at the 2010 conference in New Haven. He has been an associate editor of the Dictionary of Nineteenth Century Journalism (2008) with primary responsibility for entries on illustration, comic journals and ‘artizan’ magazines. He wrote over a hundred entries for the Dictionary, and was by the far the largest single contributor. He has written essays and book chapters on many of the major Victorian journals, including Punch, The Illustrated London News and The Illuminated Magazine, and was commissioned to write the chapter on periodicals and serials for volume V of the Cambridge History of the Book (2009). All of his books have made extensive use of material drawn from periodicals, and his forthcoming book, Comedy, Caricature and the Social Order 1820-1850, includes chapters on Punch and satirical periodical title pages from the 1830s as well as considerable further detailed study of comic magazines from this period.
Jen Morgan
My PhD is funded by an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award, and the partner institution is the Working Class Movement Library in Salford. My research forms part of a wider research project on class and print culture, using the library’s collections of newspapers and journals. The central topic of the thesis is the ways in which P.B. Shelley’s poetry was disseminated through the pages of the Owenite socialist and Chartist press. This has involved going beyond the poetry column as the medium of transmission, important as that section was, to the detection of Shelleyan images incorporated into the rhetoric of speeches, editorials, and letters.
While the WCML’s collections of printed materials are invaluable, recent digitization projects such as the 19th Century British Library Newspapers online have opened up a range of research questions that would have been difficult to pursue before their existence. Not only does it make the newspapers more accessible but the search function allows me to access Shelleyan tropes embedded in the text of many thousands of column inches. The possibilities (and also the potential problems) that such resources present the researcher in periodical studies has subsequently become a key problematic of my research practice.
