Call for papers: Broadside Day 2019

Tuesday 31st of July 2018

The Broadside Day is our annual one-day conference covering street literature in all its fascinating aspects – broadsides, chapbooks, songsters, woodcuts, engravings, last-dying speeches, catchpennies, wonder-tales, almanacs, fortune-tellers, and all kinds of cheap printed material sold to ordinary people in city streets, at country fairs, and from pedlar’s packs up and down the country in past centuries.

This year the conference is being hosted by the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow on Saturday 23 February 2019. Glasgow has a strong history of street literature publication, and we would like to encourage submissions on local themes. We are inviting contributions of 20 min papers, poster presentations or displays on any related topic which may include (but not limited to):

  • Forms of print
  • The subjects of the print (songs, stories and news items)
  • Authors
  • Printers
  • Street-sellers
  • Printing techniques
  • Street literature and literacy
  • Street literature as entertainment
  • Propaganda and dissent


For further information contact Steve Roud via [email protected]. To submit, please send an abstract (approx. 150 words) and a short biography of yourself to [email protected] by Friday 19 October.

Submit a proposal

Organised by EFDSS and Traditional Song Forum, and supported by The University of Strathclyde.