Expressions of interest | Informal, interdisciplinary works in progress seminar | The Australian Magazine as Material Object and Social Network

Detail from Max Dupain’s Street at Central, 1939.

We are interested to hear about the ways others are using Australian magazines in their research. With many of today’s magazines going out of business, and as historical magazines are increasingly being digitised, many scholars are looking into Australia’s vast magazine history, from the Port Phillip Magazine of 1843 to the latest inner city hipster publications.

We’d like to hear how others across humanities disciplines are thinking about the magazine as a social object. They were the social networks of their day, and this was often tied up with their materiality. They were physical things with touch and smell that directly addressed individuals, while also creating communities of readers. Week after week and month after month they carved out gendered spaces such as barbershops and defined temporal rhythms such as the daily commute. We love the way that they could either precisely embody specific subcultures or wildly reflect the changing contradictions in mass culture. We love how text, image, design and printing technologies interacted on their pages, leaving a rich field of research for many different disciplines.

We are thinking of hosting an informal seminar in July 2021 where works in progress from as wide a range of disciplines as possible could be shared informally either in person (in Canberra) and/or via zoom. We’d like to create an opportunity to learn more about current research, build networks of like-minded scholars, and open a space for supportive discussion and feedback. We hope that this focus on the magazine as a social object will augment existing scholarly networks and projects, and complement current collections work by libraries and archives.

If you’ve got something you’d like to share, let us know with a brief indication of:

• the topic of research
• possible presentation and discussion formats
• capacity for virtual or in person attendance
• preferred dates