The Research Society of Victorian Periodicals seeks proposals for a Special Session at the
January 5-8, 2023 MLA convention in San Francisco, in keeping with the presidential theme of
“Working Conditions” (News from the MLA 2023 Presidential Theme: Working Conditions).
We welcome abstracts of 250-400 words on all aspects of work and working conditions within
and represented by the nineteenth-century press. We particularly welcome proposals oriented
toward social justice issues that cross geographic (including oceanic) borders and that offer
intersectional approaches to race, class, and gender.
Topics might include:
- Hierarchies of working conditions in periodical production and distribution
- Outsourcing of press labor
- Reforms of working conditions and their national and international press coverage
- Periodical representations of enslaved and oppressed laborers, including colonial workers
- New archival sources for investigating working conditions demanded by periodical production
- Periodical representations of work conditions for educators (a special focus of the 2023
Presidential Theme) in day schools, boarding schools, universities, and those emerging after the 1870 Education Act - Sensational exposés of working conditions as sensation journalism and/or reformist interventions
- Press coverage of Parliamentary debates about working conditions
- Royal Commission investigations of working conditions in periodical reports and editorials, and
their inspiration in fiction and poetry - New approaches to Henry Mayhew’s documentation of workers and working conditions in
newspaper, periodical, and book form - Working-class periodicals and workers
- The use of sentimentality, empathy, and rage in press coverage of working conditions
- Global and local working conditions in the digitizing of nineteenth-century periodicals
Please send proposals and a short bio or 1-page c.v. to Linda K. Hughes by 10 March 2022.