Notes from the Field

This issue begins the third volume of the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies, and we thank you all for the submissions, readers’ reports, and ideas that make this journal possible. We have lined up a number of special issues to be published over the next few years—an issue inspired by the University of Delaware symposium “Mediamorphosis: Transatlantic Public Sphere(s), 1880–1940,” an issue on modernism and anarchist periodicals edited by Allan Antliff of the University of Victoria, and an issue on magazines and network analysis edited by James Stephen Murphy of Harvard University.

Please note, though, that we continue to invite submissions for general issues and look forward to new work across a range of disciplines, including notes about conferences, symposia, archives, and digital projects in the field, and about periodicals from the period.

We are pleased to see that the Modernist Journals Project has now added a section on Imagist anthologies featuring the Des Imagistes and Some Imagist Poets anthologies of 1914–17. Take a look at http://www.modjourn.org/render.php?view=mjp_object&id=ImagistCollection. Those interested in pulps will want to visit the Palitz Gallery at Syracuse University, which has opened an exhibition entitled Orange Pulp: The Pulp Magazine and Contemporary Culture. It features “61 works that include correspondence, manuscript drafts, paintings, and magazines,” including a story entitled “The Vengeance of Nitocris” that Tennessee Williams published in the August 1928 issue of Weird Tales.

This spring has also brought exciting news from a variety of digital projects. The National Endowment for the Humanities has funded two major projects. The first will fund the addition of a new batch of American periodicals to the Modernist Journals Project, including The Smart Set, The Masses, Camera Work, McClure’s, and The Seven Arts. The second will launch a new initiative at Princeton University called the Blue Mountain Project, which sets out to digitize avant-garde European periodicals, most of which appeared in languages other than English. Finally, the Canadian government has funded the Modernist Versions Project, co-directed by Stephen Ross, Matthew Huculak, Tanya Clement, Jentry Sayers, Susan Schreibman, and James Gifford. It will build “an integrated environment for digital ingestion, collation, mark-up, and display of modernist literary works that exist in multiple witnesses.” Magazine versions of such works will play an integral role in this project, which has partnered with the MJP as well as EMiC, NINES, and other digital humanities initiatives.

There are several panels on magazines at this year’s American Literature Association meeting, including two sessions on periodicals and working-class cultures in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Magazine panels have also been organized or proposed for the 2012 Modernist Studies Association meeting, the International James Joyce Symposium, and the 2013 Modern Language Association conference. In addition, papers are now being sought for a conference on “Women in Magazines” that will run from June 22–23, 2012, at Kingston University, London. Information is available at http://womeninmagazines.tumblr.com. We will provide reports on all of these events and welcome any news our readers might have about other conferences and events.