Notes from the Field

Welcome to the fourth volume of JMPS. We begin this fourth year with a general issue. Though we will continue to publish special issues addressing key topics in modern periodical studies, we also plan to publish a general issue each year in order to feature the best unsolicited work coming in over the transom. We project the following schedule through the end of 2015:

• 4.2 Special issue on Modernism and Anarchist periodicals, edited by Allan Antliff (2013)

• 5.1 Special issue on Visualizing Magazine Networks, edited by James Stephen Murphy (2014)

• 5.2 General issue (2014)

• 6.1 General issue (2015)

• 6.2 Special issue on Magazines and/as Media: Methodological Challenges in Periodical Studies, co-edited by Faye Hammill, Paul Hjartarson, and Hannah McGregor (2015)

Digital projects featuring modern periodicals have been shaping the field for a number of years now, inspiring new scholarly and pedagogical approaches. We welcome submissions, whether articles or notes, featuring digital humanities scholarship, and we are pleased to make announcements about digital projects on the horizon or already published. Please contact the editors or editorial board members with information about digital projects, publishing initiatives, conferences, or symposia in the field.

Since our previous issue, the Modernist Journals Project has now made available a number of new items, including the first eighteen issues (volumes 1 and 3, as there was no “volume 2”) of The Masses along with the entire run of The Seven Arts (1916–17). It also offers an improved archive of Gelett Burgess’s San Francisco–based “freak journal,” and the single issue Le Petit Journal des Refusées (1896), with higher resolution images of multiple copies of this important journal and a new introduction by Brad Evans. MJP’s Fulbright Fellow Abel Debritto has also added an introduction to the Imagist anthologies to the site. The MJP’s work at the University of Tulsa and Brown University continues on its NEH-supported project of digitizing substantial runs of five American journals, McClure’s (1901–10), The Smart Set (1913–22), The Masses (1911–17), Camera Work (1903–17), and The Seven Arts (1916–17). Finally, the Blue Mountain Project—companion site to the MJP—has launched its website at Princeton, featuring basic information about its organization as well as tantalizing images of the magazines it will add to the digital archive, including 291, Bruno’s Weekly, and Secession among many others. The site can be found at http://library.princeton.edu/projects/bluemountain.

Modern periodical studies continues to be a topic of strong focus at a number of academic conferences, with the Modernist Studies Association and MLA programs featuring several panels, including the MLA roundtable “What Is a Journal? Toward a Theory of Periodical Studies.” Lori Cole has organized a symposium “Print Culture: Past, Present, Future,” to be held at Brandeis University in October 2013, that will focus in part on modern periodicals. At the Grolier Club in New York, Kirsten MacLeod has organized a special exhibition entitled “American Little Magazines of the 1890s: A Revolution in Print,” which features the extraordinary diversity of avant-garde periodicals ranging from the Yellow Book to “freak magazines” and “fadazines” whose names we have all but forgotten. The next issue of JMPS will feature an extended review of this important event.

We hope you enjoy this fourth volume and our upcoming special issues.