Courtesy of the New-York Historical Society.
I am the principal investigator of the “Freedom’s Journal and the Intermedial Power of Periodicals” project at the University of Graz, supported by a 2024–27 FWF Esprit Grant (504-G). The project investigates how Freedom’s Journal, the first African American–owned and –operated newspaper, functioned not just as a simple communicative document of one-dimensional printed words, but as a unique medial instrument that harnessed the power of (and tensions between) images, typography, reprint practices, spatial intertextuality, and printed content to produce radical cultural meanings. In particular, it focuses on the ways that the Journal’s mediality (and intermediality) contributed to its role as a cultural institution and its theorization and facilitation of nineteenth-century African American citizenship.
The project’s resulting monograph is titled Reading Between the Lines: Meaning and Mediality in Freedom’s Journal (University of Pennsylvania Press), which is expected to appear in spring 2027.
Scott T. Zukowski 