[Commlist] conference Returning to the Page: Visualising Design and Desire in Fan Magazines

We are pleased to let you know that registration for Returning to the 
Page: Visualising Design and Desire in Fan Magazines (8-13 February 
2021) is now open. The event is free and will take place fully online; 
to register, simply send us an email via (normma.network /at/ gmail.com). This 
will ensure you are included in all communication about the conference 
schedule, and you will also be provided with all the info you need to 
access the conference’s dedicated Discord server.

We’re looking forward to seeing you there!

Please see below for further information about the event, which will 
also include an online film screening and an exciting fan magazine quiz!

*Returning to the Page: Visualising Design and Desire in Fan Magazines*

8-13 February 2021

Keynote: Sally Stein, Professor Emerita, University of California, Irvine

This conference is designed as a sequel to our 2015 event Turning the 
Page: Digitization, movie magazines and historical audience studies. 
That conference focused on the development of the study of historical 
fan magazines in recent decades, with a particular emphasis on the 
impact of increased digitization (by the Media History Digital Library, 
among others) on this development. In this context, we particularly 
emphasised the importance of “reclaiming” the fan magazine – an 
ephemeral and often academically neglected object – as an important 
research tool for the study of stars, fans, Hollywood and non-Hollywood 
film industries and cultures, and more.

The purpose of this follow-up event is two-fold. Firstly, we wish to 
investigate the ways in which the field of historical fan magazine 
studies has evolved over the past five years. Secondly, we wish to 
focus, for this event, specifically on the design of the magazines and 
the relationship between the visual aspects of the publications and 
their contents. This choice is partly motivated by the online nature of 
the conference: since we will all be consuming the conference papers on 
a small screen, this format is excellently suited to an in-depth and 
detailed study of magazines’ visual elements.

With this focus, we particularly want to emphasise the importance of 
talking about the fan magazine holistically, as a complete and 
multi-layered object often consumed by its original readers in 
unorthodox and non-linear ways. As Sally Stein noted in the context 
of/Ladies Home Journal/in 1985:

"Studies of magazines have usually treated literary texts, or editorial 
images, or ads, as independent entities, and have proceeded to analyze 
their meanings divorced from their original context. This strategy 
flattens our conception of the way magazines came to be assembled and 
then received. For these elements are certainly not apprehended in 
isolation; rather images and texts, ads and editorial matter, are each 
designed to work off each other within the larger ensemble of the 
magazine." (Stein, 1985: 7)

While some scholars have appreciated this importance of taking a 
holistic approach, we believe that much coverage of the fan magazine as 
a research object still tends to treat the visual and textual elements 
as easily separable from each other, failing to appreciate the holistic 
reading experience these periodicals offered their readers, who often 
consumed them in their available “scraps of time.” (Stein, 1985: 6) This 
conference attempts to address this lacuna.

*Conference organisers:*
Tamar Jeffers McDonald
Lies Lanckman
Sarah Polley
www.normmanetwork.com
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