Place and the periodical: An international conference on the regional magazine

Magazines are usually associated with the metropolis, with capital cities, and with national and international movements and identities such as Paris Match, Blast (London), Roma Futura (Rome) or The Dial (New York). But what happens to the magazine when it appears in the provinces, the periphery, the regions, the counties – for example ¡Hola! (Barcelona), the Double Dealer (New Orleans), Cheshire Life (Middlewich, Manchester, Chester) or De Stijl (Delft, Leiden)?

This conference aims to expand this area of scholarship, and invites contributions on a neglected magazine genre, from any era or nation.

Confirmed Keynote Speakers:

• Prof. Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, University of Geneva, leader of the Visual Contagions

• Joanne Goodwin, editor of Cheshire Life, the UK’s most successful county magazine

Conference organisers

Dr Andrew Hobbs is a Senior Lecturer in Journalism at the University of Central Lancashire, UK, and author of the first academic studies of the English county magazine, including ‘Lancashire Life Magazine, 1947–73: A Middle-Class Sense of Place’ (Twentieth Century British History, 2013) and ‘Cheshire Life, 1934-39: The birth of the modern county magazine’ (Manchester Region History Review, 2023). His monograph, A Fleet Street in Every Town: The Provincial Press in England, 1855-1900 (2018) won the 2019 Colby Prize from the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Dr Naomi Walker is a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Chester and an Associate Lecturer at the Open University.  She co-edited and co-introduced the book A Space of Their Own: Women, Writing and Place 1850-1950 (Routledge, 2023) with Katie Baker. She also wrote a chapter in this edited collection on Mary Webb and the rural space. She has recently written a chapter on Mary Cholmondeley for the From Brontë to Bloomsbury series (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). She has written an article on walking in the countryside for the Literary Geographies journal (2020) and is currently writing a chapter for the Literary Geography: Theory and Practice series published by the University of Wales Press.

Dr Matt Davies is a Senior Lecturer in English Language at the University of Chester (UK) and a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. He is author of Oppositions and Ideology in News Discourse (2013 Bloomsbury,) and a number of more recent articles / book chapters (Routledge, Edinburgh University Press) which employ critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistic methods to analysis representations in the UK press. He has also published on the use of computer-assisted stylistic techniques to analyse a corpus of song lyrics, notably Mark E Smith and The Fall (in Always Different, Always the Same: Critical Essays on The Fall, 2022). Most recently he edited and wrote the preface for A Part of No Tribe: My Life Through One Thousand Singles, 1980-89 (2023), by Ian Moss. He is currently leading the ‘Changing Chester’ strand of the English department’s Cestrian English project, exploring representations of the city of Chester from past to present.