5. Laurel Brake, the Study of European Periodicals, and ESPRit
Marianne Van Remoortel · Journal of Victorian Culture · 2021
When Sean Latham and Robert Scholes wrote in a 2006 article for PMLA that periodical studies emerged in the final decades of the twentieth century as part of the ‘cultural turn in departments of language and literature’, they were implicitly referring to the seminal work of Laurel Brake, Margaret Beetham, and others, in theorizing and researching the periodical as an object of study in its own right.1 Also implicit in their statement was that this work was taking place almost exclusively in English departments. The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP), of which Laurel is a long-standing and valued member, was founded in 1968; the Research Society for American Periodicals (RSAP) in 1991. Each has its own annual gathering, scholarly prizes, and flagship journal, Victorian Periodicals Review and American Periodicals respectively, to which vibrant communities of scholars contribute on a regular basis. What little periodical research was being done outside of the Anglophone world remained largely confined within national borders, until the European Society for Periodical Research (ESPRit) was established in 2009. ESPRit was founded by a small group of scholars from Austria, Belgium, England, the Netherlands, Scotland, Sweden, and the United States with the aim to promote collaboration and exchange among periodical researchers in Europe and beyond. As membership has steadily expanded to 400 over the past decade, the annual ESPRit conferences have evolved from single-day, one-room seminars to busy events taking place across several days and with multiple parallel panel sessions. Since 2016, ESPRit also has its own journal, the Journal of European Periodical Studies (JEPS). Running ESPRit – and nurturing European periodical studies as a research field – comes with a number of challenges that are largely absent in exclusively Anglophone contexts. Even though RSVP conferences are also attended by non-native speakers of English, the question of language is not usually asked. The language of the research object is English, and so is the language of the research community. In the context of European periodical studies, language can never be taken for granted. How do we capture the linguistic diversity of periodicals published in Europe in the broadest historical sense of the word? How do we offer scholars coming from equally diverse linguistic backgrounds a platform for sharing and discussing their work? What languages do we use at our annual conferences and in our journal? These questions are part of a lively ongoing debate among members of the ESPRit Committee on which Laurel has always been one of the most active participants. On the one hand, Laurel has consistently advocated for the egalitarian and collaborative spirit of ESPRit. This is reflected in her unwavering support of young researchers at ESPRit conferences and postgraduate workshops, but also in her outspoken stance on issues of language. If ESPRit has facilitated dialogue across language boundaries by appointing a Language Officer to the Committee and by experimenting with bilingual conferences, live translation, and bilingual issues of JEPS, this is in no small part due to Laurel’s tenacity in questioning the hegemony of English in periodical studies. On the other hand, hers is also the voice of reason. Laurel has always insisted that, while ESPRit should strive to accommodate the specificity of local contexts, its central mission to increase collaboration and exchange is bound to fail without a common language, or small set of common languages. It is this combination of generosity and pragmatism that makes Laurel, alongside Margaret Beetham, Brian Maidment, Marysa Demoor and more recently Fionnuala Dillane, one of the great bridge builders in periodical studies, within but also among scholarly organizations. It is thanks to their efforts that European periodical studies are being built on solid theoretical foundations, and that Anglo-American periodical scholarship is increasingly open to transnational, cross-language perspectives. A tangible example of the synergy this creates is the transnational work of Thomas Smits, whose doctoral research was fostered by both scholarly communities and whose monograph The European Illustrated Press and the Emergence of a Transnational Visual Culture of the News, 1842–1870 was recently awarded RSVP’s prestigious Robert and Vineta Colby Scholarly Book Prize. Laurel’s dedication to the democratic soul of ESPRit is also evident in her staunch support of its flagship journal, JEPS. Her early input as we were discussing publication models back in 2015 had a profound impact on how JEPS was established the following year. Laurel’s The News of the World and the British Press, 1843–2011: ‘Journalism for the Rich, Journalism for the Poor’, co-edited with Chandrika Kaul and Mark W. Turner, had just appeared at £63 – a price so high, she noted exasperatedly in an email that ‘might have been a blog’, that it would be largely out of reach for individual purchase.2JEPS faced a similar future if we opted for an academic or commercial publisher: the journal would either disappear behind a paywall in a large digital repository to which only libraries and institutions (and then only some of them) could afford to subscribe; or the significant costs of open access publication would fall on ESPRit or on individual authors in the form of author processing charges. Conversations with Laurel and other Committee members made us realize that for a scholarly organization that values diversity and inclusivity this was simply not an option. JEPS was founded as an online, peer-reviewed, and fully open-access journal entirely run by members of the ESPRit community, and that is how it still operates today – relying almost exclusively on the time and generosity of experts like Laurel, on an annual budget that is lower than the fees some journals charge individual authors for publishing a single article.