Print Without Borders: A Review of “Mediamorphosis: Print Culture and Transatlantic Public Sphere(s), 1880–1940”

The University of Delaware recently hosted an interdisciplinary “Mediamorphosis” symposium on modernist print cultures. Organized by Ann Ardis and Patrick Collier, the conference assembled a diverse group of researchers from several fields, whose breadth of scholarship proved essential to encompassing the sprawling, overlapping, and transnational nature of modernist periodical networks. The symposium continued work begun by its 2007 predecessor “Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880–1940: Emerging Media, Emerging Modernisms,” while also offering a welcome forum for new scholarship. Speakers were organized into nine panels over two days, and the weekend concluded with an open-forum discussion held over dinner and drinks. The conference was accompanied by a print exhibit Mediamorphosis: Periodical across the Pond curated by Mark Samuels Lasner and Timothy D. Murray, which featured rare periodicals drawn from the University of Delaware’s special collections. The organizers scheduled no concurrent panels, and as a result participants developed a shared context for discussing current and future concerns in periodical research. These discussions pursued the roles of digital humanities in print culture research; relationships between mass culture and marginal publics; the politics of bridging global and local concerns in periodical circulation, layout, and content; and finally, questions of attribution and ownership. This review offers an overview of the conference and some key papers, situating the scholarship on display within broader discussions about institutional responses to more expansive approaches to print culture and emerging research methodologies.