The magazine as medium: design, materiality, and the relationship between text and non-text in European periodicals

Date: 5 – 6 October 2012
Venue: Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium

Key Note Speakers: Gwen Allen & Laurel Brake

GWEN ALLEN is Assistant Professor at San Francisco State University. MIT Press recently published her study Artists’ Magazines: An Alternative Space for Art.

LAUREL BRAKE is Professor Emerita of Literature and Print Culture at Birkbeck, University of London. In 2010 she was awarded the Colby Prize together with Marysa Demoor for the Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism.

Proposals deadline: July 1, 2012

Marshall McLuhan famously argued that magazines and newspapers resemble mosaics: their unique amalgam of texts, images and advertising, elicit reader participation in ways no other printed matter can. Almost fifty years after the publication of McLuhan’s classic study Understanding Media (1964), magazines have gone digital and increasingly rely on audio, video and interactive elements to channel their information. But what is the effect of their particular arrangement of materials? How do texts, images, design, typography and materiality interact?

This conference seeks to explore the relationship between textual and non-textual aspects of European periodicals. We welcome proposals for 15 to 20 minute talks on the above theme, both dealing with individual magazines and discussing wider trends. Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Periodical design and typography
• Periodical materiality
• Interaction between text and design in periodicals
• The role of images in magazines
• Avant-garde and underground magazines
• Multimedia, loose leaf and unbound magazines
• The role of magazine advertising
• Non-textual elements in digital magazines

Please send a 250 word proposal for a 15 to 20 minute presentation by July 1 to the conference organizers at esprit@let.ru.nl.