Off Centre: A Preview of the Edinburgh Companion to the Regional Magazine (2028)
A Roundtable Event on October 16
The study of magazines produced away from the metropolis might seem odd, peripheral, minor, second-rate. But the periodicals of the periphery provoke vital questions about cultural and political power — fundamentally, where is culture produced?
This is the question our October Digital Event panelists will attempt to answer in a round table discussion entitled “Off centre: What Can Regional Magazines Bring to the Periodicals Table?”. This round table argues that regions are discourses as much as they are places, discourses found in publications as diverse as a nineteenth-century Liverpool photographic journal, the transactions of provincial scientific societies or a mid-Western US farmer’s weekly. These and other contributors to the Edinburgh Companion to the Regional Magazine (2028) challenge preconceived notions of the magazine and of the region, revealing the many ways in which places make periodicals, and periodicals make places, in a fundamental decentring of magazine scholarship.
Come and feel some regional feels, including superiority, inferiority, mockery, resentment, anger, pride and narrow-mindedness.
*Please double-check the timing for your local time zone due to the uneven application of daylight savings’ laws.
About Our Panelists and Talks
Introduction: Places Make Periodicals, Periodicals Make Places
Andrew Hobbs, Co-Editor
In this introduction to the first international survey of the regional magazine as a genre, I set out the scope, scale and boundaries of the collection, and then outline the regional magazine in the nineteenth century, in Britain and its empire. I discuss some useful theoretical frameworks, and argue that the regional magazine can make us see the region, the magazine and its content in a new light.
Andrew Hobbs is a co-editor of the Edinburgh Companion to the Regional Magazine. Besides his interests in nineteenth-century provincial newspapers, he has an abiding obsession with twentieth-century English county magazines.
Provincial Science Periodicals in Britain, c. 1850-1914
Ali Hatapçi
This chapter looks at the centres of science publishing in Britain through a period of significant changes both in science and in publishing practices. Through a statistical and geographical analysis, it seeks to provide insights into the emergence and consolidation of regional science periodicals.
Ali Hatapçı is a senior lecturer in British history at Université Bourgogne Europe, in Dijon. He is particularly interested in the history of science, historical geographies of nineteenth-century Britain, periodicals and publishing.
The Liverpool Photographic Society and its Journal
Peter Buse
The still extant British Journal of Photography (1860- ) started its life as the Liverpool Photographic Journal (1854-57), which claimed to be the ‘Provincial Journal of Photographic Art’. This lightning talk will consider what this meant in terms of content and editorial orientation, as well as outlining the specifically Liverpudlian dimensions of the journal and its relation to the metropolitan Journal of the Photographic Society of London (1853 – ) which it set out to challenge.
Peter Buse is Professor of Visual Culture at the University of Liverpool where he leads the School of the Arts. He has interests in psychoanalytic and photographic periodicals (separately).
Cultivating Belonging: Regional Identity in Agricultural Periodicals of the Upper Midwest
Kaari Newman
My chapter examines how farming periodicals at the fin de siècle in the Upper Midwest construct collective identities through the intertwined concepts of land, labor, and region. However, the regional identity they promote actively masks the realities of dispossession and inequality that makes it possible, and champions a form of agrarian exceptionalism tied to the myth of “manifest destiny.” I therefore highlight how such periodicals mediate belonging through a reactionary, regional ethos rooted in an ahistorical, idealized past.
Dr. Kaari Newman is a scholar of transatlantic print and material culture of the long nineteenth century, particularly women’s short fiction and other contributions to the periodical press. As RSVP’s Digital Content Manager and a founding member of the Digital Event series, she is thrilled to be presenting her research in this roundtable, rather than facilitating it.
