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Announcing the Colby Prize Shortlist

We are delighted to announce the shortlist for the 2026 Robert & Vineta Colby Scholarly Book Prize! The Colby Book Prize recognizes book-length scholarship published during the preceding year that most advances our understanding of the nineteenth-century press of Britain and its empire.

The committee has shortlisted the following three books for their excellent scholarship on periodicals of the long nineteenth century:

Please join us in congratulating our semifinalists! The winner will be announced during the Annual General Meeting in Dublin on July 25. If you are not attending the Dublin conference and/or the AGM, we invite you to follow our socials as we highlight each of these stellar contributions to periodical studies over the coming weeks, and for the announcement of our winner in July!

– RSVP’s Executive Committee and Board, on behalf the 2026 Colby Committee

Fiction on the Page in Nineteenth-Century Magazines (Oxford UP, 2025)

Maria Damkjær

Fiction on the Page is an original and ambitious book. It offers a fresh and compellingly written account of the fillers, adverts and indeterminate/hybrid content (e.g., advertorials) and serves as a launching pad for a sophisticated rethinking of genre within the nineteenth-century magazine and beyond. A book that repays re-reading, Damkjær’s study will undoubtedly inspire new methodological approaches to Victorian periodicals and encourage researchers to rethink the failures as well as the successes of editing. This is an important work of scholarship that will undoubtedly influence the field.

Undercover: Victorian Investigative Journalism in Fact and Fiction (Cambridge UP, 2025)

Stephen Donovan and Matthew Rubery

This page-turner of a book is the work of many years of deep, rigorous research. Drawing on a broad range of provincial and London newspapers between the 1860s and the First World War, it offers a revisionist history of undercover journalism that proves emphatically that investigative journalism began many years before Stead’s notorious exposé of 1885. It is a book that asks new questions about the impact of undercover journalism on readers, how it transformed fictional narratives and how it commented on precarity and mobility as well as poverty. Beautifully erudite and consistently illuminating, it is a book that will continue to influence the field of periodical studies for decades to come.

Lecturing Women in British Fiction, Periodicals and Public Orality, 1870-1910 (Routledge, 2025)

Anne-Julia Zwierlein

This book offers a thoroughly researched account of the lecturing woman. Drawing on periodicals, the archives of lecture institutions, novels, life-writing, suffrage literature, rhetorical manuals and many other sources besides, it offers a satisfyingly interdisciplinary study of gender, speech and democracy in the late nineteenth century. The book directs our attention to the forgotten figure of the woman speaker in fin-de-siècle print culture, showing the significance of women’s oral performance in text and image in penny and feminist weeklies