Studies in Periodical Cultures

Series Editors: Jutta Ernst and Oliver Scheiding

Felix Brinker and Ruth Mayer edited Modernity and the Periodical PressTrans-Atlantic Mass Culture and the Avant-Gardes, 1880-1920, volume 2 of Studies in Periodical Cultures.

Johanna Seibert authored Early African Caribbean Newspapers as Archipelagic Media in the Emancipation Age, volume 3 of Studies in Periodical Cultures. For her research on Black newspaper print in the early Caribbean, Johanna Seibert received an award from the Vereinigung der Freunde der Universität Mainz e.V. in July 2022.

Studies in Periodical Cultures (SPC) contributes to the bourgeoning field of periodical studies, exploring magazines, newspapers, and other forms of serialized media in (trans)national contexts. Research into periodicals is of high interest to many because of the medium’s pervasiveness and its enmeshment with the formation of cultural identities. This book series considers periodicals as important artifacts, seeking to assess their role for processes of cultural transfer and translation. SPC looks at how periodicals evolve in and through networks of people, material infrastructures, media markets, and changing technologies. Likewise, the community-building potential of periodicals will be considered. SPCwants to determine what function periodicals have as sites of affection, but also as aesthetic and material sources for the arts and literature. The book series produces a much-needed bridge between historical/archival approaches and present work in the field of media studies by highlighting the legacies and trajectories of the periodical business from 18th-century print to the digital age. 

SPC invites contributions from a range of disciplines including approaches developed in the humanities and social sciences. Transnational approaches to periodical studies, which provide, among others, fresh insights into foreign language publications, the role of international editions, the ethnic press, and related issues like race, gender, and sexuality are all welcome. SPC also promotes the ‘business turn’ in periodical studies and highlights material and legal frameworks, design, translation, marketing and consumption. It solicits studies about editorial procedures, the distribution, and the reception of periodicals. This book series encourages work about regional, national, and transnational communication networks, investigating, for instance, how rival publications and their interrelated dynamics shape the periodicals’ formal, material, and visual attributes. In practice, SPC proposes to study periodicals less as autonomous objects, but rather as agents embedded in changing historical contexts. SPC thus offers theoretical and methodological approaches to an interdisciplinary, transnational conception of periodical studies, and publishes peer-reviewed volumes in different languages. 

Authors are cordially invited to submit proposals and/or full manuscripts to the publisher at BRILL, Christa Stevens. 
Please advise our Guidelines for a Book Proposal. 
We strongly recommend the use of the Chicago Manual of Style in this series. 

Subject areas for exploration: 
Periodicals and Transculturality 
Literary Magazines as Transnational Periodicals 
Transnational Periodicals and the Ethnic Press 
Transnational Periodicals, Typography, and Graphic Communication 
Transnational Periodicals and the Production of Knowledge 
Periodical Studies and the Impact of the Archive 
Regionalism and Transnational Periodicals