Small Forms in Circulation: Infrastructures, Practices, Publics.
Workshop of the Research Training Group “The Literary and Epistemic History of Small Forms”

This conference investigates how the movement of brief, compressed, and otherwise small forms ranging from early modern pamphlets to counterculture magazines shape the development of diverse publics, as well as the interplay between them. Talks will explore the relationship between small textual and material forms and their publics through three related strands of inquiry: how infrastructures affect the circulation of small forms, how practices including remediation enable their circulation, and how the circulation of small forms shapes the formation, operation, and dissolution of public life.

Programme

Thursday, 28.11.: Infrastructures

14:00-14:30 Opening

14:30-15:30 Keynote
Sebastian Gießmann (Siegen University): Infrastructures and/as environments: practices and ecologies of circulation
Moderation: Anya Shchetvina

15:30-15:45 Break

15:45-16:45 Subverting infrastructures
Moderation: Anya Shchetvina

Marvin Renfordt (HU Berlin): How to smuggle queer personals through the postal system: Die Freundschaft (1919-1933)

P. Arun (Krea University): Gandhi, telegrams and anti-colonial struggle: circulation of short telegraphic messages in late colonial Inda (1920-1940s)

16:45-17:00 Break

17:00-18:00 Cultural Infrastructures
Moderation: Claas Oberstadt

Camilla Salvaneschi (Iuav University of Venice): Contraction and expansion: e-flux announcements between small textual form and Infrastructure of critique

Carlos Salazar Wagner (University of Florence): New forms of exchange in the Florentine alternative art scene in the 70s

Friday, 29.11.: Practices

10:00-11:00 Keynote
Filippo de Vivo (University of Oxford): From streets to archive: pasquinades and libels between re-mediation and de-mediation
Moderation: Morten Schneider

11:00-11:15 Break

11:15-12:45 Hybrid Media of Early Modern Information Exchange
Moderation: Johann Gartlinger

Antonio Pattori (University of Oxford): Selling a Renaissance conspiracy: disinformation and popular politics around sixteenth-century Italian political plots and assassinations

Morten Schneider (HU Berlin): Magical trouble in the streets of Paris: The diffusion, remediation and interpretation fo the Rosicrucian placards (1623)

Jameson Kısmet Bell (Boğaziçi University): Of shite and diamonds: uncommon materials and technologies of early 18th century European short literature in The Merry Thought (1731)

12:45-13:00 Break

13:00-14:00 Epistolary practices beyond ink and paper
Moderation: Gesche Beyer

Hole Rößler (Herzog August Library): Sending pictures – creating images: the circulation of portrait prints in the Early Modern Republic of Letters

Christian Marchlewitz (HU Berlin): A rock dwelling in a pebble: practises of enclosure in Kafka’s letters

14:00-15:30 Lunch Break

15:30-16:30 (Re)formatting children’s literature
Moderation: Franziska Teubert

Madeline Zehnder (HU Berlin): The habit-forming book: small forms and practices of imitation in 19th century American children’s literature

Sarah Pyke (Münster University): Frog and Toad Together: queer remediation and the cultural re-emergence of a children’s classic

16:30-16:45 Break

16:45-17:45 Evoking proximity on social media
Moderation: Anya Shchetvina

Henrik Wehmeier (University of Hamburg): Formatting the flow: the circulation of poetry on and beyond social media

Gesche Beyer (HU Berlin): Getting closer? Remediated forms of Holocaust commemoration in the Instagram project @eva.stories

Saturday, 30.11.: Publics

10:00-11:00 Keynote
Cait McKinney (Simon Fraser University): A queer history of blackouts
Moderation: Marvin Renfordt

11:00-11:15 Break

11:15-12:15 Collective worldmaking in the underground
Moderation: Claas Oberstadt

Ya’ara Gil-Glazer (Tel Hai College): “Sexual freedom, sexual tolerance and sexual generosity”: Suck underground magazine and the SELF community

Marie van Bömmel (HU Berlin): Popularizing feminism(s): an exhibition catalog as a catalyst of a social movement

12:15-12:30 Break

12:30-13:30 Small forms in colonial publics
Moderation: Chiara Sartor

Roman Alexander Barton (University of Freiburg): The making of the Irish public: affordances of small drama in Britain and Ireland, 1894-1916

Frank Newton (The Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz): Circulating graphic-visual markers: ornamentation in early 20th century pan-indigenous North American periodicals

13:30-14:00 Closing discussion

Contact & Registration: steffen.richterhu-berlin.de

Organization: Gesche Mirjam Beyer, Claas Oberstadt, Marvin Renfordt, Morten Schneider, Anja Shchetvina
Funding provided by the German Research Foundation and the Bibliographical Society of America.