‘News Networks in Early Modern Europe’, a research network funded by the Leverhulme Trust and based at Queen Mary, University of London, is delighted to announce a three-day international symposium, to be held at Queen Mary, 26-28 July 2013 on the topic “News and the Shape of Europe, 1500-1750”.  The symposium is the culminating event of the News Networks project, a two-year interdisciplinary research project with members in England, France, Italy, the Low Countries and Spain, and with associates in Scotland, Portugal, Austria and Germany. Through a series of co-ordinated research meetings over two years, the project has examined methodological challenges and developed new approaches to a European history of news.
 
There has been much work done by historians and literary scholars on national histories of news.  Yet news in early modern Europe was a distinctively transnational phenomenon; its topics were international in scope; the forms and terminologies of news, as well as the news itself, crossed national boundaries; practices of news-gathering relied on networks of international agents; it was widely translated; it travelled along commercial routes, or through postal networks that developed in express imitation of one another and were designed to be mutually connected; and the forces attempting to control the press operated, or attempted to operate well outside of their actual jurisdiction.  The spread of news and the appetite for it reflect changes in the geopolitical and confessional maps of Europe, spreading through ethnic and religious diasporas as well as diplomatic, mercantile, and scholarly networks.  It helped forge communities on a local, national and international scale.  
 
This event will combine contributions from graduate students, emerging scholars and established academics with presentations of the research findings of the network.  Proposals for papers are invited on topics sympathetic to the theme News and the Shape of Europe, 1500-1750. These might include, but are not limited to:
 
International news; networks of news; news in transmission; translating news; war reporting; news from beyond Europe; forms of news; orality / manuscript / print; the uses and afterlives of news; old (and recycled) news; images of news; news and institutions; news and the state; news and the City; news readers.
 
Proposals for papers of 20 minutes should be sent, in the form of abstracts of not more than 250 words, as well as any other enquiries about the event, to:

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The deadline for abstracts is February 28 2013; more information about the project and its activity can be found at the project blog ([log in to unmask]) and website (http://newscom.english.qmul.ac.uk).