RSVP

The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals

RSVP Blog

Join Our Last #RSVPDigitalSalon of the Spring

How can I keep up with my research if I pursue an “alt-ac” career?

How would I do research without access to my institution’s library databases and subscriptions?

Where can I find like-minded scholars who share my interests if I’m not pursuing higher education as a career?

What does it look like to work with non-academic publishers? 

In short, what does it take to be an “independent” scholar? 

In the wake of Covid-19’s impact, many have asked the above questions as they face a future where academic austerity threatens to become the “new normal.” While not all scholars seek academic positions, those who do often wonder what it takes to continue producing rigorous and satisfying research apart from the university setting.

RSVP has long supported independent researchers of all kinds whose interests intersect with the wide world and long history of Victorian periodicals. Join us on 21 May at 6 p.m. UK / 1 p.m. EST for our last RSVP Digital Salon of the spring on “Doing Research as an Independent Scholar.”

Register for this event here. Registration is free and open to the public. You do not need to be a member of RSVP to attend.

Get Your Questions About Independent Scholarship Answered

During this more informal Q&A session, our panelists will answer your questions live and offer their insights on how to do research when one is not affiliated with a university. Our panelists include: 

Judith Flanders

Judith Flanders is a journalist and highly acclaimed author of both fiction and non-fiction. In addition to her Sam Clair Mysteries series, she writes regularly about history, theatre, dance, and the contemporary arts for the Sunday Telegraph, Wall Street Journal, Spectator, TLS, and theartsdesk.com. Her most recent non-fiction book, A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order (2020), traces the history of using alphabetical order as a sorting system.

Helen Rappaport

Helen Rappaport is an international best-selling author, media consultant, and freelance historian who specialises in the period 1837-1918 in Britain and Russia. Her forthcoming books include a history of Russian emigration to Paris after the revolution in the US and a biography of Mary Seacole in the UK, both due out Spring 2022.

Marie Léger-St-Jean

Marie Léger-St-Jean is an independent scholar and digital humanist based in Montréal, where she edits Price One Penny: A Database of Cheap Literature, 1837-1860. Her research focuses on early Victorian fiction published in penny weekly numbers and its role as a nexus in a Western transmedia popular culture.

Patrick Leary

Patrick Leary is a former president and long-time member of RSVP. He is the founder/manager of the VICTORIA listserv, and he curates the Victoria Research Web, a treasure trove of Victorian research resources old and new. He also is the author of The Punch Brotherhood (2010), a prize-winning study of how oral culture shaped this iconic Victorian periodical.

Register and Submit Your Questions Now

Registration for this free event is open to all. You need not be a member of RSVP to attend and participate. And we highly encourage audience participation for this event! Our panelists are here to answer your questions about being an independent scholar. 

If desired, you can submit a question ahead of time. We will share your questions with the panelists in advance. We hope to see you there!

General questions about this or future Digital Salon events may be directed to our Vice President, Fionnuala Dillane.

Race and Trans-imperialism Workshop

One landscape format black and white glass plate negative depicting Johann Franz Julius von Haast seated by moa skeletons at the Canterbury Museum.
Fig. 1. Glass Plate Negative: Johann Franz Julius von Haast at the Canterbury Museum.

Join us on 10 May 2021 at 6 pm UK / 12 pm CT for the first in a series of RSVP workshops on race and trans-imperialism, titled, Returning Citation: The Journal of the Polynesian Society, Natural Science and Indigenous Agents.

In this one-hour workshop, Dr. Megan Kuster will talk through questions about Indigenous contributorship raised by the Journal of the Polynesian Society. She will also outline how she has been drawing on Indigenous Studies methods to recontextualise the absent presences of Indigenous knowledge brokers. 20 to 30 minutes of discussion and suggestions for further reading will follow her 30-min presentation.

Megan Kuster is a European Research Council Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the SouthHem project, in the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin in Ireland (see https://www.ucd.ie/southhem/). Megan’s current project focuses on the environment, capital and labour in colonial New Zealand. An article on this research is forthcoming in the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History (July 2021). Her presentation for RSVP’s workshop series on race and trans-imperialism is part of a new article she is preparing on Moa bones, Indigenous labour and extinction discourse.

Register Now

Register here for this free online event. RSVP membership is not mandatory to attend. Event enquiries can be submitted to the Vice President via our contact form.

Learn More About Zotero with RSVP

12 April 2021 at 1pm EST / 6pm UK
(12pm CST, 7pm Central Europe)

Do you keep hearing about the importance of using a reference management software? Are you concerned you’re not using yours to its full potential? This workshop will give an overview of the basics of Zotero. You will learn how to use this tool to keep track of citations and store primary or secondary research materials.

Join us on Monday, 12 April 2021 at 1pm EST / 6 pm UK for a walk through on setting up Zotero and how to use its many capabilities. Registration is free and open to all.

This event was inspired by our February RSVP Digital Salon brainstorming session, where members expressed much interest in reference management software.

A Hands-On Workshop

This will be a hands-on workshop, so please make sure you download and install the Zotero desktop app as well as the Zotero Connector plugin for the internet browser you use for research. Zotero is an open-source reference management software and free to use. If your library gets larger than 300 MB, you can choose to pay for back-ups. 

To use Zotero to its full potential, including back-ups and syncing on multiple devices, make sure to register for a free account too.

About Our Presenter

Marie Léger-St-Jean is an independent scholar and digital humanist based in Montréal. She researches early Victorian fiction published in penny weekly numbers and its role as a nexus in a Western transmedia popular culture. She has been using Zotero religiously for over a decade.

Household Words: How to Do Primary Source Research at Home

22nd April 2021, 6 pm UK / 12 pm CT

Illustration for Charles Dickens’ Bleak House by Phiz (Hablot K. Browne).

With research libraries around the world closed to readers due to the pandemic, many researchers have struggled to access primary sources necessary to the study of Victorian periodicals. At the same time, it is a truth universally acknowledged that since the 1990s, readers around the world have gained unprecedented access to Victorian print thanks to the proliferation of digital archives and bibliographies. What resources and methods enable us to research Victorian periodical culture during the pandemic?

RSVP will explore this question in an informal virtual roundtable with editors of open-access digital resources of great importance to the study of Victorian periodicals: Emily Bell (Curran Index; Charles Dickens Letters Project) and Stephen Basdeo and Jessica Thomas (George W.M. Reynolds Archive).

Dr. Stephen Basdeo researches 18th and 19thc popular literature and has recently focused on G.W.M. Reynolds and Pierce Egan Jnr. He is currently editing Reynolds’s newspaper writings for an open access website co-edited by Jessica Elizabeth Thomas.

Dr. Emily Bell is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Leeds. Her research interests lie in Victorian and Edwardian authorship, periodical culture, Dickens studies, and digital humanities. She is an editor for the Charles Dickens Letters Project, and co-editor of the Curran Index to Victorian periodicals. 

Jessica Elizabeth Thomas recently completed her MA in Nineteenth Century Literature and Culture at Chester University. Her BA in English was earned at Aberystwyth University. Currently, she is collaborating with Stephen Basdeo to edit Reynolds’s journalism. She has also catalogued Gladstone’s books and pamphlets at St. Deiniol’s library in Hawarden, for an AHRC-funded research project. 

Register Now

Register here for this free online event. Participation does not require RSVP membership and all are welcome to attend. If you have any questions about this event, please don’t hesitate to contact us and direct your enquiry to the Vice President.

CFP: Multilingualism and Periodical Studies

Proposal for a Special Session at MLA 2022

In keeping with the MLA 2022 presidential theme of multilingualism, the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP) invites proposals for a special session on multilingualism in nineteenth-century periodicals and periodicals studies. How does periodicals studies confront monolingual biases or move beyond them? What research examples, collaborations, institutional conditions, or teaching practices facilitate or hinder multilingual periodicals scholarship and, by turn, the widening of nineteenth-century studies?

Submit 250-word abstracts to paul.fyfe@ncsu.edu by March 24, 2021. Applicants do not need to be RSVP members to submit — and feel encouraged to circulate this call to scholars and teachers in other fields.

Accepted panelists must be (or become) members of MLA and be able to attend the MLA convention in Washington, DC in January 2022.

Join Our Conversation on Teaching 19 March

Join us on 19 March 2021 at 5 pm UK / 1 pm EST for the next installment of our #RSVPDigitalSalon 2021 series, “Teaching With Nineteenth-Century Periodicals Online”! We’ll learn more about how to teach periodicals effectively online during a time when many have had to adapt their syllabi to distance learning. Our panelists and topics include:

Melissa H. Range, Using Digital Newspapers in Teaching Nineteenth Century African American Writers

Melissa Range is the author of two collections of poetry: Scriptorium, a winner of the 2015 National Poetry Series (Beacon Press, 2016), and Horse and Rider (Texas Tech University Press, 2010). Her third collection, in progress, is an archivally driven collection that examines the abolitionist movement in the nineteenth century United States. Range is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Originally from East Tennessee, she teaches creative writing and American literature at Lawrence University in Wisconsin.

Jennifer Phegley, Introducing Periodicals to Undergraduates: Serial Reading Blogs and Wiki Magazine Projects

Jennifer Phegley chairs the English Department at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. She is the author of Educating the Proper Woman Reader: Victorian Family Literary Magazines and the Cultural Health of the Nation and Courtship and Marriage in Victorian England as well as several edited collections and numerous articles on authorship, publishing, periodicals, and pedagogy. Her current project, Magazine Mavericks: Mary Elizabeth Braddon, John Maxwell, and the Emergence of New Readings Audiences in Mid-Victorian England, has been supported by a Harry Ransom Center Research Fellowship, a Curran Fellowship, and an NEH Summer Stipend. She started teaching online courses in 2010 and never looked back!

Lindsy Lawrence, Indexing Poetry in the Digital Classroom

Dr. Lindsy Lawrence is Professor of English at the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith. She has published work on Elizabeth Gaskell, serial poetry publication, and Neo-Victorian themes in contemporary television series such as Downton Abbey. Her recent publications include an article on women poets in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in Women, Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1830s-1900s: The Victorian Period (2019). She also published a recent article on the Victorian Christmas serial tradition in contemporary television and Doctor Who for the Journal of Neo-Victorian Studies. She teaches a variety of courses in composition, cultural studies, and eighteenth and nineteenth-century British literature with a focus on publication history, gender roles, and digital humanities. She is Co-Director of the Periodical Poetry Index.

James Mussell, “Mechanical exigencies” and the enabling difference: looking again at the look of the page

James Mussell is Associate Professor in Victorian Literature at the University of Leeds.  He is the author of Science, Time and Space in the Late Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press (2007) and The Nineteenth-Century Press in the Digital Age (2012).  He is one of the editors of the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018); and books on W.T. Stead (2012) and Oliver Lodge (2020).  He is currently working on a monograph, Whispers of Print, and an edited collection on letterpress printing.

Register Now

Register for this free online event here. Participation does not require RSVP membership and all are welcome to attend. If you have any questions about this event, please don’t hesitate to contact us and direct your inquiry to the Vice President.