Congratulations to Ian Haywood, Professor of English at the University of Roehampton, UK, who has been awarded the second Linda H. Peterson Fellowship for his project: “The Rise of Victorian Caricature: Satirical Periodicals 1830-1850”. Further details of Professor Haywood’s project can be found here.
RSVP News
Winner of the Colby Book Prize 2017 Announced
The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals is pleased to announce the winners of this year’s Robert and Vineta Colby Scholarly Book Prize is The Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals and Newspapers co-edited by Andrew King, Alexis Easley and John Morton.
The Committee, chaired by Katherine Ledbetter, describes the book as “a standard reference work” that offers “cutting-edge, comprehensive scholarship by experts in each area”. The volume was seen as “wide-ranging and diverse” in ways that stepped beyond Great Britain to consider British newspapers and periodicals in relation to North American, European, Australian and Asian publications.
Congratulations to all scholars involved in the volume!
Call for Papers: Editing the Twentieth Century
Members of the RSVP community may be interested in the following CFP:
‘Editing the Twentieth Century’, The British Library. 5 September 2017
Call for Papers: What do editors actually do? What makes a good editor? And more importantly, what makes a successful editor? From the Times Literary Supplement to Les Temps Modernes and Novyi Mir, from The Criterion to Die neue Rundschau and Spare Rib, there can be no doubting the influence of literary-intellectual magazines in selecting and shaping our cultural knowledge, our beliefs and values. But we still know surprisingly little about how these crucial cultural institutions were led and managed and even how day-to-day editorial duties were undertaken in practice. Above all, we lack any kind of comparative perspective on the role of the periodical editor, both across national and historical boundaries and across different types of publications. How does the role of editor compare between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, for example, or between the French and British intellectual fields? How does it vary across literary reviews, newspapers, academic journals and commercial magazines? And in all these cases, how can we reconcile the reality of editorial practice – so often mundane and resolutely collective –with the stubbornly persistent myth of the singular charismatic editor?
As part of the British Academy funded project, Editing the Twentieth Century, we invite papers and workshop contributions addressing these issues for a one-day event to be held at the British Library on 5 September 2017 exploring the key role played by the editors of periodical publications throughout the long twentieth century. As well as specific studies of individual editors and publications, we particularly welcome comparative analyses (both chronological and geographical), theoretical approaches, and reflections from practitioners. Contributors may choose to address one or more of the following issues:
- Editorial success and failure
- Editorial responsibilities, competences and dispositions
- Editorial foundations, programmes, and manifestos
- Editorial succession
- Editorial leadership and administration
- Editorial creativity and sociability
- Editorship as authorship
- Collective and uncredited editorship
- Comparative studies across periodical genres, national contexts, and historical periods
Proposals of around 250 words for 20-minute papers should be sent to editors.bl.17@gmail.com by 15 March 2017. We also welcome proposals for joint panels of three or four related papers or other forms of presentation and discussion.
Memorial Service for Michael Wolff
A memorial gathering to celebrate the life and work of Michael Jonas Wolff will be held on Sunday, February 19, 2017 at 9:30AM at the Jewish Community of Amherst.
There will then be a gathering back at the Marriott Courtyard hotel for a light lunch after the service.
Jessica, Jeremy and Judith Wolff ask that if you would like to share a brief tribute or memory of Michael, to email them in advance.
RSVP Annual Conference CFP Extended: 15th Feb
The call for papers for our next conference Borders and Border Crossings is still open and the website can be found here. The conference will take place at
Freiburg University, Germany, 27th – 29th July 2017.
RSVP is an interdisciplinary and international organization welcoming all scholars interested in the richly diverse world of the 19th-century British press. Please send a proposal (250 words maximum) and a short CV (no more than 200 words) to rs4vp2017@gmail.com by 15th February 2017. Individual presentations should be fifteen to twenty minutes, and proposals for panels of three are welcome. Please include a brief rationale for the panel along with an abstract and CV for each presenter.
Linda H. Peterson Fellowship: Deadline February 1, 2017
In 2017 the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals will award one Linda H. Peterson Fellowship to provide a researcher with the most valuable scholarly resource—time. The Peterson Fellowship is intended to support, first and foremost, primary research on the nineteenth-century newspaper and periodical press. Therefore, eligible projects must engage primary sources, whether those sources appear in print, manuscript, or digital facsimile. The amount of the award will be $17,500. To apply for the Fellowship please see the details of eligibility and application procedure here.