RSVP Blog

And the votes are in! Please welcome our four newest board members:

• Priti Joshi
• Matt Poland
• Catherine Waters
• Teja Varma Pusapati

We appreciate your willingness to help lead our organization during an exciting time in Victorian scholarship. And of course, thanks to all who voted!

Meet Our Newest Board Members

Priti Joshi is a Professor of English and Asian Studies at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington, located on the unceded territories of the Puyallup people. She has spent the last dozen years in the archives of 19th-century Indian newspapers and is the author of Empire News: The Anglo-Indian Press Writes India (SUNY Press, 2021). She has also published articles on: advertisements in Indian newspapers (in Victorian Periodicals Review); the India exhibit of the Crystal Palace (in Museum History Journal;); “scissors-and-paste” journalism in Indian newspapers (in Amodern). Trained as a literary scholar (she has published on canonical authors of the period such as Dickens, the Brontës, Frances Trollope, Henry Mayhew, George Eliot, and Edwin Chadwick), she well remembers the trepidation with which she presented her work on periodicals, something she had never been trained in. That first RSVP conference at Roehampton, however, put her at ease instantly: everyone was welcoming, curious and encouraging about the project, and infinitely generous in sharing resources and ideas.

Matt Poland is currently finishing his PhD in English at the University of Washington. His dissertation is titled “The Global Remediation of George Eliot and Charles Dickens: Books, Newspapers, Archives.” His work focuses on transnational periodical studies and nineteenth-century media history, as well as how these approaches enrich literary criticism and critical theory. His recent publications include “Commemorative Print: Serial Monuments during the Shakespeare Tercentenary Debates” (Journal of Victorian Culture 26.1 [April 2021]). His article “Middlemarch in Melbourne” is forthcoming in the Middlemarch 150th anniversary issue of George Eliot-George Henry Lewes Studies. His is also a contributing editor to At the Circulating Library: A Database of Victorian Fiction, 1837-1901. As RSVP’s outgoing Graduate Student Representative for North America and founding member of the RSVP Digital Events Committee, Matt is pleased to continue helping RSVP attract new and diverse members and audiences in the years to come.

Catherine Waters is Emeritus Professor of Victorian Literature and Print Culture at the University of Kent. She has been a member of RSVP since 2000. In 2009, she won the Robert and Vineta Colby Prize for her monograph, Commodity Culture in Dickens’s Household Words: The Social Life of Goods (Ashgate, 2008) and became a member of the Editorial Board of Victorian Periodicals Review in the same year. She has served several judging panels and committees for RSVP over the years, including previous tenure as a Director of the Board from 2017-19. Her most recent monograph, Special Correspondence and the Newspaper Press in Victorian Print Culture, 1850–1886, based upon research from her AHRC-funded project investigating of the writing of the Victorian ‘special correspondent’, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2019. With Ruth Brimacombe, she has also curated an online exhibition from this project, Picturing the News: The Art of Victorian Graphic Journalism. She is the author of various essays on Dickens, Sala and Victorian print culture.

Teja Varma Pusapati is an Assistant Professor in English at Shiv Nadar University, India. She was educated at the universities of Delhi (B.A., M.A., M.Phil in English) and Oxford (D.Phil in English). Her doctoral thesis elucidated how a few exceptional Victorian women broke into the male dominated avenues of political journalism and offered professional models for aspiring women journalists. She has held a TORCH Women in the Humanities writing fellowship at the University of Oxford (January–April 2017) and an Andrew W. Mellon fellowship at the Huntington library in California (May–June 2017). Her articles on Victorian women’s foreign correspondence, feminist journalism, and celebrity culture have appeared in Victorian Periodicals Review, Women’s Writing and Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies. She contributed a chapter on the English Woman’s Journal’s campaign for female doctors to Women, Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain 1830s-1900 (ed. by Alexis Easley, Clare Hill and Beth Rodgers). Her book chapter on Eliza Lynn Linton’s early radical writings has been accepted for publication in the Routledge Companion to Literature and Feminism. Her monograph, Model Women of the Press: Gender, Politics and Women’s Professional Journalism, 1850-1880, is forthcoming with Routledge. Her new project examines specialised nineteenth-century imperial journals. She received an RSVP Curran Fellowship (2017) for this project.