Clare Pettitt
Beginning Again to Begin: Thinking About Serial Forms
In the 1820s, a mode of seriality was established in print and in social life which was to become the insistent rhythm of what we might now call 'modernity'. The ascendancy of the serial form created the medium for a popular historicism which was developing contiguously with a newly insistent news culture or more and more people. These material practices of seriality were open-ended and offered new and suggestive ways of inserting oneself into historical time, delivering new forms of knowledge and, I suggest, at least some pieces of the apparatus of citizenship. By the 1840s, the serial form was so well established that it enabled the political revolutions of 1848 which unspooled ‘serially’ across Europe that year. This paper will examine the seriality of 1848 and the ways in which this extraordinary year registered in literature and culture as a new consciousness of mediation. The paper will conclude by looking forward to Pettitt’s next book, The Digital Switch: Writing, Race and Resistance, 1848–1918, which will trace the intertwined literary, political and material histories of the digital, focusing on the crucial move from analogue to digital inaugurated by the electric telegraph after 1848. The digital is imagined as replacing the material with the immaterial, whilst also, and contradictorily, challenging ideas of bodily and material cohesion: coding itself can become a form of violence. Accelerated forms of communication created new regimes of control. Nevertheless, complex patterns of resistance, accommodation, and collaboration continuously unsettled Western imperial authority. By the 1880s, a ‘globalized’ world was becoming visible but it was also a very decentred and unsettled world. Pettitt argues that attending to the history of seriality across the long nineteenth century offers us a fresh way to examine the development of popular political participation.
Marianne Van Remoortel
Teaming Up in Periodical Studies: The Story of WeChangEd
In 2015–2021, I coordinated a large-scale project in periodical studies entitled “Agents of Change: Women Editors and Socio-Cultural Transformation in Europe, 1710–1920” (WeChangEd). Funded by an ERC Starting Grant and based at Ghent University, WeChangEd examined how periodical editorship enabled women across Europe to step into the public arena, participate in transnational exchanges of ideas, and shape key processes of social and cultural change at a time when their formal rights and access to power were limited. My ESPRit Prize talk will take you through the story of WeChangEd, from the early days of proposal writing to the challenges and opportunities of working in a multilingual, multidisciplinary team to delivering the LOD-based Women Editors Stories app, WeChangEd’s digital legacy. I will end with a sneak peek at what’s next for me and, hopefully, a new generation of young periodical scholars.