The European Society for Periodical Research’s annual conference brings together scholars from all over the world to engage with the latest in periodicals research. Its 9th iteration was scheduled to take place at Ruhr University Bochum, Germany in September 2020.

The conference seeks to examine journals from the 18th to the 21th century within markets and their respective sociocultural, economic, and legal frameworks. Two main areas will be explored:

(1) economies of time and space, i.e., spatiotemporal aspects of the production, distribution,
and reception of periodicals and similar serialized formats, and

(2) facets of competition and transfer between periodicals
within localised and regional as well as international markets.

For this purpose, the conference looks at periodicals as agents that react to sociocultural space configurations while simultaneously participating in their nascency, formation, appearance, and perpetual transformation.

The conference seeks to advance theoretical approaches, established analytical methods, and analysis oriented towards the spatiotemporal dimensions of periodical culture. To achieve this goal, the 9th ESPRit conference presents theoretical input, case studies, and comparative analysis from philological, philosophical, as well as sociological perspectives from disciplines such as philology, media history, history of publishing and printing, comparative literature, cultural studies, gender studies, postcolonial studies, and visual studies.