Call for Abstracts for an Edited Volume

Edited by Ivana Hostová and Eva Spišiaková

Recent scholarship at the intersection of Translation Studies, Periodical Studies, media history, and digital humanities has shown that literary periodicals are not passive containers of translated texts. Rather, they function as mediating infrastructures that shape cultural transfer through specific logics of selection, framing, circulation, and material form (Fólica, Roig-Sanz, and Caristia 2020; Guzmán 2019; O’Connor and Tănăsescu 2025). Current work in Translation Studies has also renewed attention to relational approaches and to the need to understand translation as a practice constituted through networks, infrastructures, and situated forms of mediation rather than isolated texts or actors (Cantó-Milà et al. 2025).

This edited volume seeks to contribute to this growing field by approaching periodicals as active, historically situated infrastructures of mediation and by foregrounding the work of translators, editors, reviewers, and institutions in shaping literary and intellectual exchange. Rather than treating periodicals primarily as containers of translated texts or as corpora from which large-scale patterns can be extracted, the volume treats them as sites where literary and intellectual transfer is organized, framed, and contested (Hostová 2026). We are particularly interested in the socio-technical and infrastructural arrangements that shape periodical cultures, including translators, editors, editorial boards, publishers, funding systems, ideological pressures, page layout, typographic and spatial constraints, metadata practices, digital platforms, and changing technical environments of production and circulation.

The volume is motivated by a tension increasingly visible in current scholarship. On the one hand, digitally assisted and large-scale research has made it possible to map translation flows, recover buried archives, and identify transnational patterns that would otherwise remain inaccessible. On the other hand, scholars have repeatedly noted that quantitative approaches must remain attentive to the heterogeneity of periodical cultures—their unstable institutional positions, divergent temporalities, editorial agendas, material constraints, and dense paratexts (Fólica, Roig-Sanz, and Caristia 2020; Bucaria and Batchelor 2024). Research on periodicals in smaller and semi-peripheral literary cultures has likewise shown that medium-sized datasets and data-driven analyses illuminate historical and cultural patterns only when interpreted alongside editorial direction, subsidy structures, and the cultural politics of mediation (Hostová et al. 2025).

This collection therefore invites contributors to explore how translation in periodicals becomes possible, legible, and consequential through infrastructures of mediation rather than through translated texts alone. We welcome chapters that examine how literary transfer is organized in and through periodicals; how translators and editors operate within, against, or through editorial and institutional constraints; how non-human factors such as layout, format, metadata, page space, and digital infrastructures shape translational outcomes; and how periodicals condition what becomes translatable, readable, discussable, or canonizable.

A central premise of the volume is that agency in periodical cultures is distributed, relational, and often unstable. We approach agency not as a heroic quality of individuals but as something that emerges through networks of collaboration, conflict, authority, and material support. Contributions may focus on translators and editors as mediators, but may equally examine the conditions under which mediating labour becomes visible, obscured, enabled, or constrained.

Particular attention will be paid to peripheral, semi-peripheral, and politically unstable literary ecologies. In such environments, periodicals often operate not as stable organs of literary prestige but as precarious or improvised infrastructures. State-socialist and post-socialist cultures, minority or exile presses, activist magazines, multilingual borderlands, little magazines, feminist journals, and avant-garde collectives frequently reveal with particular clarity how translation is used to negotiate ideological pressures, articulate alternative literary agendas, or introduce minoritized repertoires into public discourse (Roig-Sanz and Meylaerts 2018). In the case of the feminist periodical Aspekt, for example, forthcoming work approaches the magazine as a serial space in which feminist concepts are introduced, reframed, and stabilized through the interplay of original writing, translation, and paratextual framing (Hostová and Spišiaková, forthcoming).

The volume also welcomes chapters addressing the relationship between periodicals and broader questions of literary and cultural power. These may include the role of translation in canon formation, the circulation of non-canonical or marginalized literatures, the transfer of theory, science, and political ideas, and the construction of national, regional, or transnational literary cultures. Contributions may take comparative or single-case approaches and may focus on individual actors, journals, networks, or longer-term structures of circulation. What matters most is that they treat periodicals not merely as repositories of translated texts, but as sites where literary transfer is actively organized.

We especially welcome theoretically informed and methodologically explicit contributions. Digital and data-driven approaches are particularly encouraged where they are used not simply to map flows but to recover hidden repertoires, neglected translators, collaborative editorial ecosystems, or silenced interventions. At the same time, the volume welcomes contributions grounded in archival research, bibliographic reconstruction, close reading, microhistory, oral history, discourse analysis, Actor-Network Theory, Social Network Analysis, and other approaches capable of linking macro-patterns to situated practices of mediation. Here, digital methods are treated not as ends in themselves, but as part of a broader methodological ecology that remains historically, politically, and materially attentive.

The editors intend to submit the completed volume proposal to a leading academic press.

Suggested Topics

Topics may include, but are not limited to:
• periodicals as infrastructures of literary, cultural, and intellectual mediation
• translators, editors, reviewers, and other mediators shaping periodical cultures
• translators’ multiple roles, including editing, curating, annotating, and framing
• distributed, relational, or contested agency in periodical cultures
• translator agency, editorial strategy, and activism
• translation in peripheral, semi-peripheral, or politically unstable ecologies
• periodicals as spaces of cultural resistance, ideological struggle, or symbolic negotiation
• paratextual framing, editorial positioning, and the politics of selection
• material and medial conditions of translation, including format, layout, page space, seriality, and multimodality
• circulation of minoritized, marginalized, or non-canonical literatures
• periodicals and the transfer of theory, philosophy, science, or political ideas
• translation in periodicals and the making of national, regional, or transnational cultures
• microhistorical or biographical studies of translators and editors
• actor-network, social-network, bibliographic, or database-driven approaches
• methodological reflections on blending close reading with large-scale or digitally assisted analysis

Submission Information

Deadline for abstracts: 31 December 2026
Please submit an abstract of 500–600 words (excluding references), accompanied by a 100–150-word biographical note and 3–6 keywords.
Send submissions to: ihostova@ukf.sk and espisiakova@ukf.sk
Deadline for full chapters: 31 July 2028
Completed chapters should be approximately 8,000 words, including notes and references.
Expected publication: 2029

Editor Biographies

Ivana Hostová works on translation history, periodical studies, and cultural mediation, with particular attention to literary periodicals, non-market circulation, and peripheral and semi-peripheral cultures. She has published on Slovak and Central European translation history, feminist and queer approaches to translation, and periodicals as sites of cultural resistance and alternative literary exchange. She is based at Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra and the Institute of Slovak Literature of the Slovak Academy of Sciences.

Eva Spišiaková works on literary translation, translation history, and cultural memory, especially in Central and Eastern Europe. She is the author of Queering Translation History: Shakespeare’s Sonnets in Czech and Slovak Transformations (Routledge, 2021) and has led and contributed to international research projects on translation and representation. She teaches Translation Studies at Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra.

References

Bucaria, Chiara, and Kathryn Batchelor, eds. 2023. Media Paratexts and Translation. Special issue, Translation Studies 16 (3).
Buzelin, Hélène. 2005. “Unexpected Allies: How Latour’s Network Theory Could Complement Bourdieusian Analyses in Translation Studies.” The Translator 11 (2): 193–218.
Buzelin, Hélène. 2007. “Translations ‘In the Making.’” In Constructing a Sociology of Translation, edited by Michaela Wolf and Alexandra Fukari, 135–69. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Cantó-Milà, Natàlia, Diana Roig-Sanz, Nasrin Ashrafi, and Reine Meylaerts. 2025. “Relational Approaches and Translation Studies: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue.” The Translator 31 (1): 1–14.
Fólica, Laura, Diana Roig-Sanz, and Stefania Caristia, eds. 2020. Literary Translation in Periodicals: Methodological Challenges for a Transnational Approach. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Guzmán, María Constanza, ed. 2019. Translation and/in Periodical Publications. Special issue, Translation and Interpreting Studies 14 (2). https://doi.org/10.1075/tis.14.2
Hostová, Ivana. 2026. Výskum prekladu v periodikách. Metodologické rámce a slovenské prípadové štúdie po roku 1989 [Research on Translation in Periodicals: Methodological Frameworks and Slovak Case Studies after 1989]. Habilitation lecture. Nitra: Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra.
Hostová, Ivana, Eva Spišiaková, Marianna Bachledová, Natália Tyšš Rondziková, Igor Tyšš, Róbert Novotný, and Richard Gramanich Štromajer. 2025. “Beyond the Market: Translation and Cultural Resistance in Slovak Periodicals.” World Literature Studies 17 (3): 109–31.
Hostová, Ivana, and Eva Spišiaková. Forthcoming. “Periodické štúdiá, feministické myslenie a slovenský kontext: Časopis Aspekt v súvislostiach.” Slovenská literatúra.
Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
O’Connor, Anne, and Raluca Tănăsescu. 2025. “Translation and Infrastructure: Concepts and Applications.” Translation Studies, November, 1–20. doi:10.1080/14781700.2025.2562191.
Roig-Sanz, Diana, and Reine Meylaerts, eds. 2018. Literary Translation and Cultural Mediators in Peripheral Cultures: Customs Officers or Smugglers? London: Palgrave Macmillan.