RSVP’s Digital Events Committee is back in action!
We’re delighted that Lorraine Janzen Kooistra will inaugurate our year’s events on Friday, February 3 at 8 a.m. PST/10 a.m. CST/ 11 a.m. EST / 4 p.m. GMT. She will be guiding attendees in the first of our recurring “Pick a Periodical” event series with a discussion of Volume 5 (April 1895) of The Yellow Book.
What Is Pick A Periodical?
Pick A Periodical is a new event series we will host…periodically…in which we ask a scholar and member of RSVP to select an issue (or range) of a newspaper or periodical that we will circulate ahead of time. Attendees should browse the issue prior to the event. Drawing on the lead’s expertise and attendees’ observations, our event time will be devoted to discussing what everyone found revelatory, fascinating, perplexing, or otherwise interesting about the issue(s) in question. In so doing, we hope to generate collaborative discussion, collective learning, and congenial conversation!
Join Us February 3
As with most RSVP digital events, this event is free and open to all, though we welcome and encourage you to become a member of RSVP if you are not already one. You will receive a Zoom link info upon registration. We hope to see you there!
Why Volume 5 of The Yellow Book?
Dr. Kooistra has selected Volume 5 (April 1895) of The Yellow Book (open access!) to kick off our first “Pick a Periodical” event on February 3. The Yellow Book offers a unique opportunity to read a single issue of a magazine in relation to its editorial processes and title’s overall brand in the context of an international media event and its fallout. The April 1895 arrest of Oscar Wilde, who was carrying a yellow-bound book (mistakenly identified by the press as the “Yellow Book,” but actually a French novel), resulted in the firing of Aubrey Beardsley as art editor of the magazine, and the removal of his illustrations from the volume before it went to print.
Since then, scholarship has typically examined The Yellow Book along the fault line of before and after Beardsley. The actual contents of the watershed Volume 5—its selections, deletions, substitutions, sequences, and adjacencies—have received only minimal attention.
Dr. Kooistra will open the discussion by drawing attention to a single artwork, Constantin Guys’ “A Sketch.” We’ll then turn to your observations, comments, thoughts, and questions about the volume, its contents, contiguities, images, etc.
Stay Tuned for More Events in 2023
In addition to our “Pick a Periodical” series, Digital Events has many other kinds of events planned, including:
- A Speaker’s Forum, where we hear of members’ work
- Periodic Support sessions, or informal sessions for troubleshooting and solving research and pedagogical questions
- A Reading Group, in which we discuss an important, relevant, or thought-provoking piece of scholarship within periodical studies
We have a full slate – an event almost every month! – and hope you will join us as RSVP continues to build community and intellectual exchanges through multimodal events and communication.