Curran Fellowships support various kinds of research into primary sources for the history of the 19th-century British press. This year’s competition supports research to be undertaken in 2019. The deadline for applications is December 1, 2018. Details can be found here: https://rs4vp.org/curran-fellowship/
RSVP News
The Curran Index – update
The ongoing effort to identify the writers of articles, stories, and poems in the Victorian press that is the Curran Index is getting a new look, and new super-powers! With the support of RSVP, our intrepid editor, Gary Simons, is working with a team to convert the old set of pages, which are made up of blocks of text that have had to be scrolled through, into a fully functional online database that can be searched in a variety of ways. Please visit this new and improved work in progress here (http://curranindex.org/) and read about all the latest additions to this rapidly expanding resource.
Nineteenth-Century Synergies: Ventures at Home and (Ad)Ventures Abroad
Nineteenth-Century Synergies: Ventures at Home and (Ad)Ventures Abroad hosted by the Department of English, at Presidency University, Kolkata, West Bengal, India took place on the 22nd and 23rd of February, 2018.
Professors Joanne Shattock and Linda Hughes, gave papers entitled “Journalism and Literature: Contested Professions” and “Tennyson, The Princess, and Tennyson’s Global Women Readers” respectively.
More about the conference can be found here.
VPR/DNCJ promotion
RSVP is giving away copies of the Dictionary of Nineteenth Century Journalism (DNCJ) free to new and renewing subscribers to the Victorian Periodicals Review! (If you renewed recently, just add another year to your renewal and you’re good to go.) You don’t need to put in a promotion code, just sign up and this essential reference book will be mailed to you, while supplies last.
These copies are already going fast, and there’s a limited number of them, so best to act quickly if you want a copy. And of course with your subscription (which only costs $35) comes membership in RSVP. It’s a win-win!
CFP: Special Issue of Victorian Periodicals Review – Essays in Honor of Sally Mitchell
CFP: Special Issue of Victorian Periodicals Review
Essays in Honor of Sally Mitchell
Proposals due March 1, 2018
Completed Essays due September 1, 2018
Sally Mitchell (1937-2016) was a pioneering feminist scholar and teacher in the field of Victorian studies whose work opened new avenues for the study of women’s writing, cultural history, and journalism. Throughout her career, periodicals were at the heart of her research, which included groundbreaking work on women’s penny papers and popular reading, an innovative study of The New Girl, critical biographies of Dinah Mulock Craik and Frances Power Cobbe, indispensable histories such as Daily Life in Victorian England and Victorian Britain: An Encyclopedia, as well as edited editions and anthologies of Victorian women’s writing. To honor her contributions to our field and highlight her continued legacy in Victorian periodical studies, we plan to publish a special issue of VPR in Fall 2019.
Contributions to the special issue should be 5,000 to 9,000-word essays (including notes and bibliography) focused on any topic inspired by Sally Mitchell’s work on the periodical press. Essays might explore the Victorian press in relation to:
- • Victorian women writers and women’s reading
- • The “new girl” and girls’ culture
- • Daily life and social history
- • Popular fiction and literary history
- • Feminist activism, networks, and mentoring
- • New directions in biography
- • New approaches to teaching with periodicals
Please submit a 200-word abstract and a CV by March 1, 2018 to guest editor Katherine Malone at katherine.malone@sdstate.edu.
You can download a PDF version of the CFP here.
Completed essays will be due September 1, 2018.
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.