The Linda H. Peterson Fellowship was named after the widely influential Yale professor and longtime RSVP Board member and Vice President, Linda Peterson. The purpose of the Peterson Fellowship is to support one scholar for four full-time months to enable him or her to conduct a research project on the 19th-century British periodical and newspaper press.
Previous winners of the Peterson Fellowship are listed below along with their projects.
2024
Hannah Hudson
“Magazines, Romanticism, and Imperial Knowledge: Identity, Commodity, Miscellany”
2023
Robert Burroughs
“S. J. Celestine Edwards, the ‘Black Champion’ of Victorian Oral and Print Culture”
The adjudicating committee noted that “This is a timely, deeply researched proposal…It spotlights the first Black editor of periodicals in Britain, while also pursuing interesting theoretical implications about oral, written, and print modalities; about Celestine Edwards’s cultural engagements; and about Black British experience then and now.”
Candace Ward
“The Caribbean Cosmopolis: Pan-Caribbean Identities and Nineteenth-Century Colonial Print Culture”
As the committee noted, “This proposal continues the urgent project of globalizing periodicals studies and complicating narratives about imperial relations, identity, and colonial archives with case studies from the Caribbean.”
2022
Laura Vorachek
“The Society of Women Journalists, 1894-1914”
The decision committee commented that with its “impressive” temporal and international scope, this project “promises to add significantly to our knowledge and understanding of the role of women journalists and the press from the late nineteenth century to the beginning of World War One.”
2021
Mary Shannon
“Billy Waters, Periodicals, and Nineteenth-Century Popular Culture”
Committee members lauded this project, which focuses on a Black entertainer who received press coverage in the transatlantic periodical press, as “a fascinating and timely project.” They also noted its potential to contribute to current critical conversations about “undisciplining” Victorian studies, about “vernacular culture” in its complexity, and about disability in the Victorian period. Finally, they pointed to the project’s “wide range of relevance and application” in “mov[ing] beyond historical ‘recovery’ of lost figures to reflect upon the wider methodological issues associated with their study” and in reaching “multiple field audiences.”
2020
Andrew Hobbs
“How Victorian Newspapers Were Made: The Diaries of Reporter and Editor, Anthony Hewitson (1836-1912)”
Anthony Hewitson was a typical Victorian journalist, working in one of the largest sectors of the periodical press, provincial newspapers. His diaries, written between 1862 and 1912, lift the veil of anonymity hiding the processes and networks involved in the creation of Victorian newspapers. This searchable, open-access scholarly edition will offer a wealth of new information about reporting, freelancing, subediting, newspaper ownership and publishing, illuminating aspects of Victorian periodicals, and Victorian culture, far beyond provincial newspapers. It will provide an indispensable research tool for historians of Victorian newspapers, and a fascinating read for anyone interested in social and cultural history.
2019
Alexis Easley
“Periodical Print Media and the Rise of the Popular Woman Poet, 1830-50”
Lorraine Janzen Kooistra
The Dial Digital Edition on Y90s 2.0
This fellowship supported the digitization of The Dial (5 volumes, published occasionally between 1889-1897) during Phase Two of the Y90s 2.0 project. Yellow Nineties 2.0 is an open-access scholarly resource for the study of eight late-Victorian little magazines in the context of their production and reception between 1889 and 1905. The Dial Digital Edition is based on physical copies held in Toronto Metropolitan University Library Archives and Special Collections and digitized copies from the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, University of Delaware Library, Museums and Press.
SHORTLISTED
- Trev Broughton, “Periodical Selves: Autobiography, Journalism, and Print Culture in the Nineteenth Century”
- Jennifer Phegley, Magazine Mavericks: Marital Collaborations and the Invention of New Reading Audiences in Mid-Victorian England
- Andrew Hobbs, “Scholarly Edition of the diaries of Victorian provincial journalist Anthony Hewitson (1836-1912)”
2018
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 2018 Peterson Fellowship.