Mark your calendars! The dates for the 2020 annual conference for the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals will take place on September 10-12, 2020 at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. A formal CFP will be forthcoming, so keep an eye on our website and social media feeds for updates!
Conference News
Conference registration now open
The website for our 2019 conference, Work/Leisure, Duty/Pleasure, is now available. Discounted registration is available until May 15.
Conference notifications have been sent
All applicants for the 2019 RSVP conference were emailed on March 26 regarding their submission. If you did not see this email, please check your spam folder. The conference website will be available soon with registration and accommodation information.
RSVP 2019 Annual Conference CFP Announced
The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals is pleased to announce the call for papers for our next annual conference.
The conference, entitled ‘Work/Leisure, Duty/Pleasure’, will be hosted by the University of Brighton, UK, and will take place 25-27 July 2019.
Proposals are invited for 20 minute papers or panels of three or four related papers that address any aspect of the Victorian periodical or newspaper press. Proposals relevant to the Conference theme of Work/Leisure, Duty/Pleasure would be particularly welcome. For more information about the conference theme and how to submit a proposal please visit our conference page.
All those giving a paper at the RSVP conference are required to be members of the Society.
Women in Punch 1841 – 1920, 02 Nov 2017, Senate House, London
Registration is now open for ‘Women in Punch 1841 – 1920’, 02 Nov 2017, Senate House, London.
Punch: or the London Charivari first appeared in 1841, published as a weekly magazine with a strong political agenda. Although some work has been done on the social reform agenda of Punch, very little is known about women in the magazine. Were there any women contributors? What representations of women appeared in the magazine, both in images and text? Women were certainly a subject for humour and caricature in Punch, but what were the political implications of those comic illustrations? What was the role played by verse in the depiction of women? Did representations of women change significantly between 1841 and 1910, and if so, how and why? How do the caricatures and/or depictions of women in Punch differ or resemble those in other illustrated papers, such as the Comic Almanack (1835 – 1853), The Illustrated London News (1842 – 1989), the Man in the Moon (1847 – 1849), andFun (1861 – 1901)? Queen Victoria subscribed to Punch; did it have many women subscribers and/or readers? How was the ‘New Women’ reported in the pages of the magazine? Was Punch interested in female education or the entry of women into the professions?
These are some of the questions to be explored by this one-day conference, which will look at some of the below themes:
- Women in the literary marketplace
- Education
- ‘New Women’ and ‘cartoons’
- Domesticity
- Punch and the Intellectual Woman
- Women and sports
- Representations of Political Women
- Punch and female readership
- Sex, body, and Punch caricatures.
The programme for the day can be found here.
Conference organiser: Mariam Zarif, mariam.zarif@kcl.ac.uk.
Dr. Paul Fyfe wins Prestigious Donald Gray Prize
Congratulations to RSVP member Dr. Paul Fyfe winner of this year’s Donald Gray Prize for the best essay published in the field of Victorian studies.
Dr. Fyfe’s article ‘An Archaeology of Victorian Newspapers‘ was published in the Winter 2016 edition of Victorian Periodicals Review.
The NAVSA judging committee – Deborah Denenholz Morse (Chair), Mary Jean Corbett, Martin Danahay, and Peter Hoffenberg – commented:
Paul Fyfe’s ‘An Archaeology of Victorian Newspapers’ excavates a portion of “the largely hidden history of how Victorian data gets to now” by filling in some of the gaps between then and now. This fascinating essay, which draws on the methods of book history and media archaeology, as well as practicing a form of “investigative scholarly journalism,” explores the occluded material histories of one large-scale digitization project: the British Library’s massive collection of nineteenth-century newspapers. He establishes its complex relations to a range of mid-twentieth-century agents, technologies, and institutions, from the preservation efforts undertaken in the aftermath of the second world war to the emergence of (and continuing role played by) microfilm in the collaboration between libraries, micropublishers, and the forerunners of the CIA. Victorian media became digital, Fyfe argues, both by subordinating the provinces to the metropole and by having the techno-labor of its production outsourced to India and Cambodia. In a timely investigation of what now constitute “the enabling conditions of our scholarship,” the essay charts a path forward for thinking about—and critically reflecting on—the digital tools we all use.