You will work as part of a team on the NWO-funded VICI project ‘
Redefining the Region: The Transnational Dimensions of Local Colour’. This project aims to examine the unexplored transnational dimensions of local colour by studying media representations of regions and local colour fiction from the long 19th century in European and transatlantic frameworks. These materials provide unique case studies for transnational approaches: images and texts about European regions reached transnational audiences through emerging periodical cultures, dissemination of local colour fiction across Europe, and transcultural networks with North American diasporic communities.
The project’s objectives are:
1. examining portrayals of regional-transnational dynamics (foreigners, emigrants) in illustrated periodicals and local colour fiction;
2. researching the transnational circulation and reception of European local colour imagery, reports, fiction;
3. exploring the reconstruction of European regions by the media and local colour writers across the Atlantic.
Subproject 1: The Transnational Dimensions of the Region in European Illustrated Periodicals, 1842-1900.
Your PhD research, which is to result in a dissertation, concerns the transnational dimensions of the region in European illustrated periodicals (e.g. Illustrated London News, Le Monde Illustré, Illustrirte Zeitung), over the period 1842-1900. While these illustrated periodicals have traditionally been identified with nation building, they had a transnational scope in terms of subject matter, and they borrowed heavily from periodicals elsewhere: it was common that illustrations and texts (in translation) ‘travelled’ from one national context to another, being reprinted in periodicals elsewhere in Europe (Martin 2006:12).
Your subproject investigates:
1. in what ways regions ‘at home’ and elsewhere in Europe featured in these periodicals;
2. additionally, how visual and textual materials on the region circulated (in reprint) in various European contexts and readerships through this new mass medium.
Furthermore, you will contribute research results to the project’s database. You are also expected to participate as a speaker in the project’s programme of meetings (e.g. expert meetings, conferences).