The Patrick Leary Resource Development Grant is named for long-time RSVP supporter, Board member and former President, Patrick Leary. The grant is intended to support one or a team of researchers in creating resources that will facilitate the work of other scholars in their studies of British newspapers and periodicals in the long nineteenth century.
Previous winners of the Leary Resource Development Grant are listed below, with links to their project reports as available.
2026
Yellow Nineties 3.0: A Model for Sustainable Victorian Periodicals Websites
Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, Constance Crompton et al.
This project has two linked objectives. The first is to ensure the ongoing accessibility and usability of the Yellow Nineties Online, an esteemed and widely used digital resource for scholars of fin-de-siècle print culture. The second is to develop and share an open-access primer that other digital periodical projects approaching end-of-life can adopt to secure their long-term sustainability. The committee particularly valued the project’s second objective: the production of a freely available toolkit for other aging digital projects. After a period of rapid digitisation and development, RSVP is proud to support continued access to widely used open-access initiatives such as the Yellow Nineties Online, and this project offers a thoughtful and practical response to that need. The committee was also impressed by the substantial scholarly and practical experience of the team, the structured proposal, and the clear budget.
The full team includes:
- Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, co-PI (Toronto Metropolitan University)
- Constance Crompton, co-PI (University of Ottawa)
- Reg Beatty (Toronto Metropolitan University)
- Jason Boyd (Toronto Metropolitan University)
- Kelly Demody (Toronto Metropolitan University)
- Alice Defours (University of Ottawa)
2025
Digitizing Early Nineteenth-Century Literary Annuals with Internet Archive
Katherine Harris
This project makes a potentially field-changing contribution to Victorian periodicals research by digitising ninety volumes of literary annuals in collaboration with the Internet Archive. By providing an open-access research resource of an otherwise unavailable collection, the project will enable a deeper understanding of the periodical press in Britain and its empire by making it possible to search, discover, and analyse historical representations of colonial India and women’s bodies in early Victorian annuals. The project will enable further research into an often-dismissed genre as a global periodical form, and careful thought has been given to questions of accessibility, sustainability, OCR, image tagging, metadata, and reparative language. The project also provides valuable developmental opportunities for doctoral researchers.
2024
Two awards were given in 2024.
The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine: An Open-Access Index
Julie Sorge Way
This project builds upon Way’s previous research by creating a full open-access index of material from the popular secular magazine, The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, a monthly British miscellany magazine with affordable price-point, running from 1852-1879. Though the EDM had broad readership and has much to offer researchers, it has been difficult to locate and navigate in open-access editions—until now. This project seeks to make the entire contents of the magazine’s run more easily searchable for scholars and readers alike.
Punch’s Pocket Book Archive
Françoise Baillet, Clare Horrocks, and Sonja Lawrenson
An international digital humanities project that aims to create a fully searchable, open-access archive for all volumes of Punch’s Pocket Book (1843-1881). Portable and practical, this annual publication of the humorous and incisive Punch, or the London Charivari (1841-2002) offers a portal into Victorian era politics, economics, journalism and related publishing practices, visual culture, periodicals, and literature, as well as the quotidian life of its users.Portable and practical, this annual publication of the humorous and incisive Punch, or the London Charivari (1841-2002) offers a portal into Victorian era politics, economics, journalism and related publishing practices, visual culture, periodicals, and literature, as well as the quotidian life of its users. [PPBKA]
2023
Multimodal AI, Image Analysis, and the Illustrated Periodical Press
Thomas Smits, Paul Fyfe, Julia Thomas, and Ben Lee
The committee commented that “This is an outstanding proposal by four experienced scholars working at the forefront of machine learning methods for studying illustrations in the nineteenth-century press… It is exemplary in its collaborative and interdisciplinary approach it promises to undertake innovative scholarship that has a notable outward facing component.”
2022
Printed Matters: Early Representations of the Caribbean in British Periodicals
Louise Kane
Collecting articles from British periodicals that represent the Caribbean, Printed Matters will “expand and expedite” new research possibilities in the field. Scholars of British imperialism, transatlanticism, Caribbeanism, and more will benefit immensely from this exciting project.
Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition: Investigating an Archival Future
Jim Mussell, Mark Turner, and Paul Caton
Investigating an Archival Future will be invaluable as “a clear model for how to wind down digital projects while preserving their usability.” While it focuses on preserving and archiving an existing resource, the Nineteenth Century Serials Edition (ncse), it will nonetheless develop the field of periodical studies in a crucial way.
2021
Recovering BIPOC Voices from the Victorian Periodical Press
Dino Felluga, Adrian Wisnicki, and Kenneth Crowell
The decision committee deemed this project “a master class in decolonial recovery work that could offer a powerful intervention in the current state of the field’s methodological representation.”
2020
Completing and Updating Price One Penny for its Tenth Anniversary
Marie Léger-St-Jean
Created in 2010, the open access database Price One Penny: A Database of Cheap Literature presents information on serial literature published in penny weekly numbers between 1837 and 1860, whether in numbered parts or in periodicals. It covers works popularly called ‘penny bloods’, revealing how enmeshed they were in the wider British print culture and as a vector for the transnational circulation of stories. This grant supports research and technical work for the website’s tenth anniversary, including additional archival research, adding newly-recovered works to the database, adding new features to the site, updating the code, and exporting the data to other resources and digital archives.
2019
In order to comply with U.S. tax regulations related to our change in status as a private foundation, RSVP was forced to cancel the 2019 Patrick Leary Field Development Grant.
2018
British Chilean News: Digitizing the 19th-Century British Press in Chile
Jennifer Hayward, Jessie Reeder and Michelle Prain Brice
This project creates a transformative resource for studies of Anglophone periodicals published in Latin America in the nineteenth century. Working with the Biblioteca Nacional de Chile, the project seeks to digitize its holdings of Anglophone newspapers published between 1843 and 1914 and create an searchable open-access digital archive. “British Chilean News” will therefore facilitate new research into the British-Chilean contact zone, immigration and settler communities, Latin American history, and transatlantic publishing.