Introducing Our Next Editor for the Curran Index
The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP) is delighted to announce the appointment of Professor Martin Hewitt as the new Editor of the Curran Index. On the unanimous recommendation of the RSVP Board of Directors, Professor Hewitt will assume the editorship for a five-year term beginning 1 January 2026.
RSVP extends its sincere thanks to both outgoing editors, Lars Atkin and Emily Middleton, for their leadership, dedication, and contributions to the development and success of the Curran Index. Their exemplary work over the past five years has strengthened the Index’s reputation as a vital research resource, and the academic community owes them a considerable debt of gratitude.
The Curran Index is a collaboratively sourced, ongoing, open-access project devoted to identifying the authors of unsigned and pseudonymous articles, reviews, poetry, and fiction in the periodical press of Britain and its empire over the long nineteenth century. The larger purpose of the project is to enrich and expand our understanding of the press and its influence in nineteenth-century culture by “piercing the veil of anonymity” that continues to obscure the identities of the contributors who made up the contents of that press.
“Martin brings to the Index a keen enthusiasm for building out a working prosopography of Victorian periodical authorship,” says Patrick Leary, who in 2003 worked with the late Eileen Curran to create the Curran Index and now chairs its advisory committee. “Under his leadership the Index will expand in many directions, hugely enriching a wide assortment of literary and historical research.”
About Professor Hewitt
Professor Hewitt is a distinguished historian of the Victorian era with an international scholarly reputation and a long record of academic leadership. He retired from Anglia Ruskin University in 2023 and currently serves as Visiting Professor in the School of English at the University of Leeds and as a Research Associate in the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography at the University of Oxford. His publications include The Reception of Darwinian Evolution in Britain: Darwin’s Generations (Oxford University Press, 2024) and The Dawn of the Cheap Press in Victorian Britain (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015).
The founding editor of the Journal of Victorian Culture (1994–2001), Professor Hewitt currently serves as President of the British Association of Victorian Studies (BAVS). No stranger to the work of the Curran Index, he has recently contributed attribution research derived from publisher’s ledgers from Chambers’s Journal, work that has been supported by a 2025 RSVP Curran Fellowship and is developing into a broader project on patterns of authorship.
RSVP is confident that Professor Hewitt’s erudition, skill, and experience will allow him to make great strides with the Curran Index, an effort for which he plans to enlist the help of scholars eager to serve as volunteer Associate Editors. We look forward excitedly to this next chapter in the Index’s history as it approaches its 25th anniversary in 2028.
