RSVP

The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals

RSVP Blog

Congrats to our 2nd Annual Mitchell Prize Winner!

The results are in! Our 2022 Mitchell Dissertation Prize Winner is Maryam Sikander for her “Oudh Punch (1877-1915): Satire and Parody in the Colonial Contact Zone.” Dr. Sikander’s dissertation examines the transcultural life of Punch in India through the framework of the colonial “contact zone.” Per our Mitchell Prize committee, this ambitious project demonstrates a deft touch in managing the breadth of translation and archival work as it crosses historical and geographical boundaries. It makes a clear contribution to the study of Victorian periodicals and their transformations in colonial contexts.

Honorable Mention

An honorable mention goes to Elizabeth Rawlinson-Mills’s “Bards, Priests and Prophets: The Newspaper Poets of the South African War (1899-1902).” Our committee called Dr. Rawlinson-Mill’s project “a beautifully written and methodologically interesting exploration of bards, poets and prophets during the Second Boer War.”

About the Mitchell Dissertation Prize

Black-and-white portrait of scholar Sally Mitchell

The Sally Mitchell Dissertation Prize is awarded annually to the best Ph.D. dissertation, defended in the previous calendar year, that explores the 19th-century British periodical press (including magazines, newspapers, and serial publications of all kinds) as an object of study in its own right, not as a source of material for other historical topics.

Established in 2020, the prize honors Sally Mitchell, a longstanding and highly valued member and leader of RSVP. Notably, Sally was a committed and ardent mentor of graduate students who worked hard to support their work and advance their careers.

Thanks to all who sent in submissions for this year, and especially to our committee members who had to choose just one from so many wonderful submissions!

Congratulations to our 2022 Award Winners

The results are in for our Colby, Peterson and Field Development awards and grants!

Robert and Vineta Colby Book Prize

Book cover of Priti Joshi's Empire News. Includes title and stylized image of crumpled newsprintThe winner of this year’s Robert and Vineta Colby Book Prize is Priti Joshi’s Empire News: The Anglo-Indian Press Writes India (SUNY Press, 2021). The prize committee praised Empire News as “a valuable, innovative and timely study that brings to life the circulations of English language newspapers published in mid-century India with an immaculate level of care and attention to archival detail.” This book “compellingly illuminates the ways in which the empire was not a monolithic construct of the press, but an often contradictory space of competing voices, shaped by the journalistic need for copy, access to sources, and volatility in the business of press production.”

The committee would also like to give an honourable mention to Alison Moulds’ Medical Identities and Print Culture, 1830s-1910s (Palgrave, 2021) as a highly impressive work of scholarship for an early career researcher.

Linda H. Peterson Prize

Laura Vorachek is this year’s recipient of the Linda H. Peterson Prize for her project, The Society of Women Journalists, 1894-1914. As 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.”

RSVP Field Development Grant

This year, the Field Development Grant committee has made the somewhat unusual decision to divide the award equally between two equally worthy and complementary projects: Printed Matters: Early Representations of the Caribbean in British Periodicals (Louise Kane) and Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition: Investigating an Archival Future (James Mussell, Mark Turner, and Paul Caton).

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.

Investigating an Archival Future, meanwhile, 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.

Congratulations to all! Thanks to those who submitted and to our awards committees for all their hard work. Stay tuned for further announcements regarding our Sally Mitchell Dissertation, VanArsdel and Expanding the Field prizes, which will be made later this summer.

Congratulations to our 2022 Curran Fellowship Winners!

In case you missed it in our last (March) newsletter, we’re pleased to announce this year’s Eileen M. Curran Fellowship winners!

These travel and research grants are intended to aid scholars of 19th-century British periodicals who wish to study primary print and archival sources. These fellowships are made possible by a generous bequest of the late Eileen Curran, Professor Emerita of English at Colby College and inspired by her pioneering research on Victorian periodicals.

Our 2022 fellows are:

  • Sue Chen, “Preparing the Child for Science”: Victorian Children’s Periodicals and Scientific Literacy
  • Richard Scully, The Last Victorian: Sir Bernard Partridge, Pictures, Periodicals, and Politics in Britain, 1861-1945
  • Catherine Birch, Female Punch Contributors, 1868-1918
  • Stéphane Sadoux, The Cheap Cottages Crusade: Rural Bylaws and the Periodical Press, 1901-1905
  • Tsz Ting Yan, China, Humour, and the Opium Wars in Punch: An Intertextual Enquiry
  • Julie Sorge Way, Inviting Submission: Isabella Beeton’s Journalism and Editorial Work at the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, 1857-1865
  • Beth Rodgers, L.T. Meade and the Professionalisation of Authorship at the Fin de Siècle

Congratulations again to our winners! We look forward to the fruits of your archival work.

Already thinking about next year’s fellowships? Learn more about our annual fellowships, grants, and prizes on our website.

Help Us Improve the Curran Index

Using the Curran Index: Experiences, Search, and Improvements (Focus Group)

17 March 2022 from 6-7:30pm (GMT) /2-3:30pm (EDT)

Dr. Lara Atkin and Dr. Emily Bell, editors of the Curran Index, invite Victorianist researchers and teachers to attend this focus group to feed directly into planned changes to the search and navigation of the Index. The Curran Index is a treasure trove of information about who was writing the articles, reviews, stories, novels, and poems of the Victorian periodical press. This is an opportunity to discuss your experience and issues using the existing Index interface, and provide feedback on what would be most useful to you as a researcher moving forward.

Register to attend the focus group here. Registration is free and open to all.

We’d Like Your Input on Improving the Curran Index

The Curran Index features over 168,000 contributions to influential 19th-century British weeklies, monthlies, quarterlies, and annuals. The current website was launched in 2017, and we are about to undertake some exciting work to improve the speed, layout and search function of the Index. We invite any Victorianist teacher or researcher, at any career stage, inside or outside of the academy, to come along and share their views.

In this session, we will show the current Curran Index interface and outline the proposed changes. Then, we will open up discussion around the following points:

  1. Have you used the Curran Index in your research? If so, what for (e.g. was it to look up a specific author, or periodical, or article)? If not, why not?
  2. How easy or difficult do you find it to navigate around the website? Please give a rating on a scale of 1-5 (where 1 is easy and 5 is difficult) and explain your answer.
  3. How easy was it to find the information you were looking for? Which facets did you use to narrow your search?
  4. What kind of information would you expect to see on the homepage? What are the most important search filters for your research?
  5. Would a Curran Index blog with research case studies of how the index has been used by other researchers be useful to you?
  6. What other information would you expect to find on the website?
  7. What additional features would be useful?

Have Ideas But Can’t Attend the Focus Group?

If you are unable to attend the event on 17 March but would like to pass on your thoughts on the questions above, or indeed anything to do with the Index more generally, we’d be very pleased to hear from you. Please email the editors directly with any feedback you might have. Thank you for your thoughts!

Half-Day Workshop on Multilingualism and Periodical Studies

The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals in conjunction with the European Society for Periodical Research is excited to announce

Multilingualism and Periodical Studies
A Half-day Virtual Workshop

31 March 2022
3pm-6pm (BST/CET)

This two-part online workshop brings together scholars and researchers on the topic of
multilingualism in periodicals scholarship. It seeks to spotlight ongoing projects in academic
research across languages, as well as to ask questions about the challenges and possibilities that pertain to multilingual approaches.

Because of their generic hybridity and varying circulations, periodicals have always invited interdisciplinary methods, which our participants expand into the study of periodicals’ linguistic richness. Periodicals define far more intricate political imaginaries and publics than just the nation. Their linguistic complexity and language circulation work within as well as across political formations at various scales. And the geographic and generic reach of periodicals calls for scholars to research them with just as capacious an approach.

“Multilingualism and Periodicals Studies” brings together representatives from multiple
disciplines and international arenas. The half-day workshop includes two 90-minute virtual
sessions. It begins with a session of research presentations about active projects in the field,
followed by a roundtable discussion among participating scholars and our audience. The
workshop is jointly hosted by the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP) and the
European Society for Periodical Research (ESPRit).

The event is free and open to anyone interested in attending either one or both sessions. Membership in RSVP and ESPRit is not required, though advance registration is needed. Register for the event here.

Confirmed Speakers

Research Presentations

Roundtable

CFP: RSVP Special Session for MLA 2023

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.