Expanding the Field, A Roundtable
Our May Digital Event
On Friday, May 15, RSVP is thrilled to welcome all the past winners of the RSVP/Victorian Periodicals Review (VPR) Expanding the Field Prize: Sourav Chatterjee (Rice), Nilkantha Pal (Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Mohali), and Tarini Bhamburkar (Bristol). This roundtable event will be chaired by VPR editor Katherine Malone, and address how these prize-winning articles work to expand Victorian periodical scholarship and where the field is moving next. Join us to hear about some of the most exciting research developments in periodical studies!
The VPR Expanding the Field Prize is awarded annually for an outstanding essay that diversifies the existing geographic, racial, and ethnic composition of nineteenth-century periodical studies. The submission period for the 2026 Prize is May 1 through June 15, 2026. Results will be announced in August 2026.
About Our Panelists
Sourav Chatterjee
Sourav Chatterjee is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Transnational Asian Studies at Rice University. Sourav won the Expanding the Field Prize in 2022 for his essay: “Against Imitation: Anti-Colonial Caricatures in Basantak or the Bengali Punch.” Sourav’s research interests are South Asian literary and visual cultures and British imperialism. He is currently working on his first book titled, Ephemeral Empire: Printing Pessimism in Colonial South Asia. At Rice, Sourav teaches classes on Modern South Asian Literature, Global Gandhi, Indian Films, Partition Narratives, Gender and Power in South Asia, and Many Nationalisms.
Tarini Bhamburkar
Tarini Bhamburkar is a research affiliate in the Department of English at the University of Bristol. Her research focuses on women’s Anglophone and regional-language feminist magazines from late-Victorian Britain and India. Her research has appeared in the Journal of Commonwealth Literature and Victorian Periodicals Review and she has also written for The Conversation. She currently holds a Curran Fellowship from the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals.
Nilkantha Pal
Nilkantha Pal is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Mohali. His dissertation traces the emergence of Bengali children’s periodicals and their intervention in the adult-child relationship in colonial Bengal. He has received the Mark Samuels Lasner Fellowship in Printing History 2024 from the American Printing History Association for his ongoing doctoral research project, and the 2024 Expanding the Field Prize from the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals for his essay. Nilkantha’s research interests include the sociocultural and intellectual history of Bengal, the history of print cultures, and children’s literature of South Asia.
