Notes from the Field

With this issue, the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies enters its second volume. This year, 2011, promises to be an eventful one in modern periodical studies. The current issue features a report on the NEH "Magazine Modernism" seminar directed by Sean Latham in the summer of 2010 at the University of Tulsa. This coming summer, periodicals studies scholars can look forward to the conference announced in the previous volume of JMPS: "Scientifi c Poetics in European Modernist and Avant-garde Magazines of the 1900s to the 1940s," an international ILLE conference (in collaboration with INTERMAG and OuDM) at Mulhouse University in France, June 16-18, 2011. We hope to feature an account of this conference and of the INTERMAG group in a future issue of JMPS. The Modernist Studies Association's Thirteenth Annual Conference, "Structures of Innovation," features a number of panels and seminars of interest to scholars of periodical studies, and its location in Buffalo affords a special opportunity: easy access to the University of Buffalo's poetry collection, which features approximately 5,000 periodicals related to poetry.

Several conferences and other events relating to periodical studies are also in the works. To commemorate the centenary of William Stead's death aboard the Titanic, a two-day conference organized by Laurel Brake, Ed King, Roger Lockhurst, and James Mussell will take place at the British Library April 16-17, 2011. Paper proposals are currently being invited and full information on the conference can be found online at https://sites.google.com/site/stead2012/home. Newspapers will also be the focus of a conference this November 18-19 in Dublin. Organized by the Newspaper and Periodical History Forum of Ireland, this year's conference theme is "Writing the Press into History." A call for papers has been issued and information about both the conference and the forum can be found here: http://www.newspapersperiodicals.org/. Finally, the University of Delaware will host a print culture symposium September 9-10 titled "Mediamorphosis: Print Cultures and Transatlantic Public Sphere(s), 1880-1940." For more information, send an e-mail message to printculture@bsu.edu.

Two other exciting developments have also been recently announced. First, the Modernist Journals Project (www.modjourn.org) has now added to its ever-growing archive of modernist periodicals a full run of the issues of The Little Review in the public domain (1914-1922), including all the episodes of Ulysses that appeared in the journal. Second, a new database titled "What Middletown Read" has been released; it contains the full circulation records for the Muncie Indiana Public Library for the years 1891-1902. Although quite local in focus, such a database nevertheless provides an unparalleled resource in modernist studies for exploring the detailed reading habits of a community. The database is hosted by the Ball State University Library: http://www.bsu.edu/libraries/wmr.