RSVP

The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals

Graduate News

Join Our Grad Students for a Research Workshop

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Part of the RSVP Digital Salon Series 2021

We warmly invite everyone to join us on Friday, February 26 2021 at 1 p.m. (EST) / 6 p.m. (UK) for our next #RSVPDigitalSalon event, Doing Periodical Research Online: A Graduate-Directed Workshop on Process and Practice! This online workshop is led by graduate students, for graduate students, and welcomes all scholars of the periodical press.

Discussions about our research often focus (understandably) on our methodologies. This workshop will turn to our processes and practices as researchers.

Graduate students will give brief responses to a series of “How to” questions, followed by an open discussion where audience contributions will be encouraged. We hope to share our practices, provide each other with practical insights, and generate a shareable list of tips, tricks, and resources as we continue to conduct much of our work online.

We’ll answer questions like “How do you:

  • Discover primary research materials?
  • Identify secondary materials?
  • Organize your sources and notes?
  • Write? (ideas, drafts, revision…)
  • Use particular tools or practices?
  • Fit your research into ongoing discussions?
  • Pivot when obstacles come up?

Register here for this free online event. Participation does not require RSVP membership; all are welcome.

Though this event is organized by graduate students in support of graduate students, supervisors and anyone interested in periodical research are also encouraged to attend!

For any queries about this event, please contact us and direct your enquiry to our Vice President.

 

 

Announcing the Sally Mitchell Dissertation Prize

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Black-and-white portrait of scholar Sally MitchellThe Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP) invites submissions for the Sally Mitchell dissertation prize. This prize will recognize the best Ph.D. dissertation, defended in 2020, that explores the 19th-century British periodical press (including magazines, newspapers, and serial publications of all kinds) as an object of study in its own right, and not only as a source of material for other historical topics. We welcome projects from a range of disciplinary perspectives focused on any aspect of the periodical press within Britain itself or in the many countries, within and outside of the Empire, where British magazines and newspapers were bought, sold, and read during “the long nineteenth century” (ca. 1780-1914).

The winner will receive a monetary award of $1,000.

How to Apply

Applicants should submit the following via the Fluid Review application portal by March 1, 2021:

  • A cover letter with full contact information
  • A title page, abstract and table of contents
  • A sample chapter (do not submit the full dissertation with these materials)
  • The name and email address of your dissertation advisor

Applicants’ dissertation advisors will be asked to confirm the successful viva/defense date.

After reviewing these materials, the prize committee will solicit full dissertations for further consideration. Applications will be accepted beginning February 1, 2021. The Mitchell Prize winner will be announced in July or August of 2021.

Questions about this dissertation prize may be directed to the president of RSVP at president@rs4vp.com.

About Sally Mitchell

The Sally Mitchell Dissertation Award was named in honor of Sally Mitchell, a longstanding and highly valued member of RSVP who served on the organization’s board and on its senior advisory committee. She was the author of five books, including the biography Frances Power Cobbe: Victorian Feminist, Journalist, Reformer and The New Girl: Girl’s Culture in England, 1880-1915. Much of her work focused on women writers, women’s history, the social history of the period, and the role of periodicals. Sally Mitchell was a committed and ardent mentor of graduate students and worked hard to advance their careers.

CFP: Special Issue of VPR for Summer 2022

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Guest editors Laurel Brake, Fionnuala Dillane, and Mark Turner invite essays of 5,000-7,000 words in length (including notes and bibliography) for Victorian Periodical Review‘s next special issue, “The Book Review in the Long Nineteenth Century,” to be published Summer 2022.

Book reviews, reviewing, and reviewers pervade the nineteenth-century press, but scholarly attention to the genre, the practice, and to reviewer networks is disproportionately sparse. The genre of reviews filled the early nineteenth-century quarterlies to the extent that they were known generically as Reviews. While retaining their name, Reviews transformed their frequency and contents, surviving as monthly miscellanies, without losing their claim to superior status among magazines, newspapers, and weeklies that also published reviews in profusion and in diverse forms. Although unheralded as a form, they occupied a significant space in weeklies such as the Athenaeum, Spectator, Literary Gazette, and Saturday Review and monthlies such as the Review of Reviews. Many dailies developed literary supplements that functioned as review spaces. The book review, this defining feature of our objects of study, has yet to receive sustained critical attention.

Topics To Consider

This special issue seeks to invite scrutiny of reviews across the press in the long nineteenth century as cultural objects and cultural practices, alive to questions of class, gender, race, and nationality. Submissions might address any of the following:

    • The Review and book reviews
    • Taxonomies, forms, and genres (e.g., occasional notes; causeries; notices; essays-like-review; review-like-essay)
    • Exclusions and/or inclusions
    • Hierarchies of print
    • Critical language of book reviews
    • Conventions of book reviewing
    • Book review as dialogue
    • Cultural value of the book review
    • Repurposing, remediating, recycling book reviews
    • Uses of anonymity and/or signature (including pseudonyms)
    • Affects of the book review
    • The book review in regional, national, and/or transnational contexts
    • Economics of the book review
    • Book review networks/Networks of print
    • The book review in relation to other reviewing practices/forms (e.g., of performances; art exhibitions; concerts)
    • Editing review pages
    • Politics of the book review
    • The book review and the development of disciplines

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Submit Your Abstract by 15 January 2021

Please signal your interest by 15 January 2021 with a 200-word abstract and brief (50-word) biography. Responses will be sent by 15 February 2021.

Submission deadline for final draft of selected articles of 5,000-7,000 words in length (including notes and bibliography) is 15 August 2021 for publication in 2022.

Both abstracts and final essays should be submitted to Laurel, Mark and Fionnuala by emailing 19cReviewing@gmail.com. You may download a PDF of these guidelines here for reference.

We Want Your Input on Future Digital Events!

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Tell Us What You Think

In addition to the RSVP Digital Salon, we’d like to gauge RSVP members’ interest in attending any other virtual event(s) this upcoming academic year (Fall 2020-Spring 2021). To that end, we’ve created a brief survey to collect your thoughts. Your input will drive our efforts to help us stay connected during this time, so thank you in advance!

Please take a moment to fill out the survey here: https://forms.gle/ECRfYZKSWTaAi4fh8. It shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes or so of your time to fill out.

Congratulations to Our 2020 Curran Fellowship Winners

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Last week we announced our Curran Fellowship winners for 2020 via our monthly newsletter. Curran Fellowships are awarded annually to help scholars defray the costs of travel to and research on primary sources and archives in the 19th-century periodical press. Applicants’ projected research may involve study of any aspects of the periodical press in any of its manifold forms, and may range from within Britain itself to the many countries, within and outside of the Empire, where British magazines and newspapers were bought, sold, and read during “the long nineteenth century” (ca. 1780-1914). Awards are made possible through the generosity of the late Eileen Curran, Professor Emerita of English, Colby College and long-time RSVP member.

This year our Curran Fellowship winners embark on a diverse variety of projects, from exploring global interactions to shifting temporal boundaries to uncovering understudied areas of periodical interest. The winning projects are as follows (full abstracts available here):

    • Diana Muriel Cooper-Richet (Centre d’histoire culturelle des sociétés contemporaines, Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines), English-Language Periodicals Published in French Provincial Towns (1818-1912) 
    • Lydia Craig (Loyola University Chicago), Female Philanthropic Knitting:  Lady Harriet Scott’s “Grandmother” Patterns in The Queen    
    • Laura Diaz-Esteve (Universitat Pompeu Fabra), The Southeast Asia British Press and the Philippine-American War (1898-1902)
    • Beth Gaskell, The History of Early Regimental Journals
    • Erica Haugtvedt (South Dakota School of Mines & Technology), Transfictional Character and Transmedia Storyworlds in the British Long Nineteenth Century         
    • Sofia Huggins (Texas Christian University), Blank Spaces: Global Geographies of Moral Capitalism in the Anti-Slavery Reporter, 1831-1833      
    • Haejoo Kim (Syracuse University), Anti-Vaccination Periodicals and the Rise of Lay Medical Agency in Nineteenth-Century Britain
    • Carole O’Reilly (University of Salford), Satirising the City: Civic Humour, Place and Accountability in the Later Nineteenth Century Satirical Press       
    • Neil Ramsey (University of New South Wales Canberra), Romantic Era Military Periodicals and the Emotions of War
    • Maryam Sikander (SOAS University of London),  Punch in India: The Transcultural Life of a British Institution     
    • Matthew Wale, The Natural History Periodicals of Edward Newman (1801-1876)

Thank you to all who applied and congratulations to this year’s winners. We look forward to seeing how you advance our understanding of the Victorian periodical press!

RSVP 2019 Annual Conference CFP Announced

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The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals is pleased to announce the call for papers for our next annual conference.

The conference, entitled ‘Work/Leisure, Duty/Pleasure’, will be hosted by the University of Brighton, UK, and will take place 25-27 July 2019. 

Proposals are invited for 20 minute papers or panels of three or four related papers that address any aspect of the Victorian periodical or newspaper press. Proposals relevant to the Conference theme of Work/Leisure, Duty/Pleasure would be particularly welcome. For more information about the conference theme and how to submit a proposal please visit our conference page.

All those giving a paper at the RSVP conference are required to be members of the Society.