The workshop will re-examine claims surrounding the national particularity of popular culture; assessing whether it can be understood in genuinely European terms. We will measure the interaction of British and European journalists, artists, printing and business colleagues and discuss the limits and opportunities for borrowing or sharing of artistic and written form across national boundaries. We aim to examine these cultural and commercial developments in the context of the changing international status of the USSR and the USA, considering the developing international affiliations of communist journalists of France and Germany along political lines, and the business networks revised each year in the international conferences of commercial art.

Eight experts will present papers on understudied newspaper, magazine and popular non-fiction genres; drawing on disciplines from ‘outside’ history such as business and psychological theory as well as the study of literary form. By exposing the similarities and differences between the popular cultures of countries that are often assessed within their own rigorous historical traditions, we hope to spark new networks of communication and study and also invigorate broader historical debate about methods and approaches in social and cultural history today.

Date and venue: 30 June 2011, Linacre College, University of Oxford
Time: 9:30am – 4pm

If you would like to attend, please register your interest via email by Wednesday 8 June: sarah.newman@linacre.ox.ac.uk.