RSVP

The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals

Members News

Congratulations to Our Curran Award Winners!

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RSVP is pleased to announce the following winners of this year’s Curran Fellowships! Curran Fellowships are a set of travel and research grants intended to aid scholars studying 19th-century British magazines and newspapers in making use of primary print and archival sources.

This year’s projects cover a fascinating array of topics, including a wide variety of transnational and interdisciplinary studies. Our winners for 2021 include:

  • Anne Anderson, Philistines versus Aesthetes: Punch’s Campaign Against Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetes
  • Brittany Carlson, (Re)mediating Math Anxieties with The Narrative, the Ephemeral, and the Visual, 1830-1940
  • Eoin Carter, Richard Carlile and Radical Print Culture (1815-43)
  • Eloise Forestier, The Victoria Press: A Transnational Platform of Periodical Editorship
  • Alan Guenther, Christian-Muslim Relations in Victorian Periodicals
  • Vaibhav Singh, Before the Revolution: Technology, Mechanization, and the Periodical Press in Colonial India
  • Francesca Strobino, Investigating William Henry Fox Talbot’s Experiments in Photomechanical Printing
  • Jessica Terekhov, The Life Cycle of the Part-Issued Victorian Novel

You can read more about the projects here.

Want to Apply for Next Year?

Inspired by and made possible through the generosity of the late Eileen Curran (Professor Emerita of English, Colby College), Curran Fellowships are awarded annually. Applications open in mid-November for the following year. While our funding cycle for this year is now closed, there’s always time to get started on next year’s applications! Learn more about the Curran Fellowship‘s history, application guidelines, and past winners on our website.

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.

 

 

Communications Coordinator Wanted – Applications due February 15

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RSVP seeks applicants with excellent organizational and time management skills to assist with our daily operations as a Communications Coordinator. As the Communications Coordinator, your responsibilities would include:

  • Working with the President and Vice President to manage and update membership lists
  • Distributing the monthly newsletter
  • Assisting with digital event enrollment and administration
  • Supporting communications related to the annual conference, elections, and awards

The Communications Coordinator will receive a $5,000 stipend paid at regular intervals over the course of the appointment. Employment begins on March 1 and runs through December 31, 2021. The position is renewable for the following calendar year. Duties will average 5 hours per week (at $20 per hour for 250 maximum hours) but are expected to fluctuate.

How to Apply

We encourage candidates interested in supporting RSVP’s activities and goals to apply. Applications will be accepted through February 15, 2021. To apply, interested applicants should send the following materials to the RSVP president (president@rs4vp.org):

  • A 1-page cover letter explaining your interest in and qualifications for the job
  • The names and email addresses of two references (include these in your cover letter)
  • A 1-page c.v.

Graduate students and independent scholars are encouraged to apply. Current Officers and Directors of RSVP are not eligible. Contact us with any questions.

Join Us January 22 for Discussion on Decolonizing Periodical Studies

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We warmly invite you to join us on Friday, 22 January 2021 at 1 p.m. (EST) / 6 p.m. (GMT) for “A Discussion on Decolonizing Periodical Studies,” part of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals’ Digital Salon Series 2021.

This event, like those taking place in cognate scholarly organizations and in
wider public arenas, will engage with biases that shape nineteenth-century
periodical studies. It will also provide the foundation for the development of a
nineteenth-century periodical studies reading group focused on race and
transimperialism. Our roundtable participants include:

  • Caroline Bressey, Reader in Cultural and Historical Geography,
    specialist in the Black Presence in Victorian Britain, University College
    London
  • Priti Joshi, Professor of 19th-century British literature and culture, with
    an emphasis on colonialism and race relations, University of Puget
    Sound, Washington
  • Candace Ward, Professor of English, specializing in early Anglo-
    Caribbean literature and culture, Florida State University

Register for this free online event here. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting. Registrants will also receive optional readings authored by our roundtable participants to spur our discussion about a week prior to the event.

Participation does not require RSVP membership; all are welcome. You may also learn more about our work as an organization and how to join RSVP by exploring our website.

For any queries about this event, please send an email directed 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.