he theme of Structures takes inspiration from the host city of Ottawa, where natural and built environments intersect in ways that foreground questions of infrastructure, governance, and historical memory. From the Algonquin Anishnaabe stewardship of the region to Ottawa’s designation as Canada’s capital by Queen Victoria in 1857 and its iconic Neo-Gothic architecture, the city invites reflection on ‘structure’ in both literal and metaphorical senses. While structure can refer to the arrangement of parts into an identifiable whole, it also invokes Raymond Williams’s structure of feeling and, more recently, Brian Larkin’s conception of infrastructure as the material and relational systems that enable movement and connection
We welcome proposals on any aspect of nineteenth-century British periodicals or newspapers, including—but not limited to—the following:
Texts, paratexts, and editorial arrangement
Literary form, serialization, and the architecture of newspapers and magazines
Typography, layout, and visual organization
Publishing, printing, and production systems
Distribution and communication infrastructures (railway, postal, telegraph)
Networks of contributors, editors, publishers, readers, and translators
Information management, archives, classification, data and databases
Institutional structures (scientific, legal, governmental, religious, educational)
Queering and querying (hetero)normative infrastructures
Empire, colonial administration, and global circulation
Economic structures, advertising, and markets
Social structures of class, gender, race, and labour
Infrastructures of the Black press in Canada and other areas of the British Empire
Monuments, ruins, and the material cultures of print
Structural failure, censorship, repair, and alternative publishing networks
Structures of feeling, resistance, and counterstructures
Digital methods and pedagogies for studying Victorian periodicals
Indigenous presence in the periodical press
We encourage applicants to consider the form, materiality, and/or genre of periodicals, rather than focusing solely on the content that appears within them.
Download the CFP here
Submit proposal here.
Victorian
Web
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Created 7 September 2026 Last modified 18 August 2026
