A new collaborative research project on Liverpool newspapers in the nineteenth century, led by Nick Foggo at Liverpool University, has recently posted information on its website, which can be found here.
RSVP News & Events
Curran Fellowships competition opens, applications due December 1, 2016
The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP) is pleased to announce the competition for the ninth annual Curran Fellowships, a set of travel and research grants intended to aid scholars studying 19th-century British magazines and newspapers in making use of primary print and archival sources. The Curran Fellowships are made possible through the generosity of the late Eileen Curran, Professor Emerita of English, Colby College, and inspired by her pioneering research on Victorian periodicals. This year, RSVP anticipates awarding at least six fellowships of as much as $5000 each.
Visit the Curran Fellowships page to read the full call for proposals and reports of previous winners. A printable version of these guidelines and instructions for the 2016-17 Curran Fellowships competition may be found here.
CFP: Special Issue of Victorian Periodicals Review: “Victorian Education and the Periodical Press”
Issue: Winter 2017
Notify editor of intention to submit: July 15, 2016
Deadline for final submission: December 1, 2016
Email: Janice.schroeder @ carleton.ca
“Beyond the means of subsistence, it is difficult to think of anything more important than education to the well-being and sense of self-worth of most nineteenth-century Britons” (Florence Boos, “The Education Act of 1870: Before and After,” BRANCH). Yet within Victorian periodical studies, education in its various dimensions has received little focused attention. The Dictionary of Nineteenth Century Journalism, for example, contains no topic entries on education or schooling; the entry on the professions and journalism contains scant mention of the teachers’ press. Perhaps because the “Education Question” was so broadly-encompassing, it has been difficult for press researchers to make inroads into this vast topic. This special issue aims to do just that, by inviting papers on the role of the press in theorizing the purpose of education, shaping various education debates, and educating readers. How did specialist, mainstream, and newspaper presses intervene in the most pressing questions about education and schooling before and after the Education Act of 1870? How did the press function as a space of instruction for an increasingly print-literate populace? How did the press help to define “education” itself?
Specific areas of investigation might include but are not limited to the following:
• the teachers’ press and professional journals for educators both in England and abroad;
• education in/and the imperial press;
• education debates in the established/mainstream press;
• famous educators and the press;
• special interest publications and organization journals like the Ragged School Union Magazine, Schoolmaster or the Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge;
• university and school magazines;
• illustration and education;
• press debates on the education of women and girls;
• reading, pedagogy, and serial publication;
• mechanics’ institutes and magazines;
• teaching and instruction in periodicals for children;
• the rise of print literacy and the press;
• deaf and blind education and the role of the press;
• domestic education and the press;
• practical advice and forms of everyday instruction in the press.
VPR invites essays of 5,000-9,000 words in length (including notes and bibliography) for the Winter 2017 issue of the journal. Notify the guest editor (Janice.schroeder @ carleton.ca) of intention to contribute by July 15, 2016 with a 200-word abstract. Submission deadline for final draft of articles is December 1, 2016. Please prepare contributions according to the Chicago Manual of Style.
Thanks,
Jan Schroeder
Associate Professor
Department of English
Carleton University
Ottawa, ON
Conference of the European Society for Periodical Research, Liverpool, July 7-8, 2016
Periodical Counter Cultures: Tradition, Conformity and Dissent
Liverpool John Moores University will host the fifth annual conference of the European Society for Periodical Research (ESPRit) on 7-8 July 2016. For details, please visit the conference website. Brian Maidment, Vice-President of RSVP, will host the gathering.
RSVP announces first winners of Field Development and Peterson grants
RSVP is very pleased to announce the first winners of the RSVP Field Development Grant and the Linda H. Peterson Fellowship, both made possible by a generous bequest to RSVP by the late Eileen Curran, pioneering researcher and Emerita Professor of English at Colby College.
The winners of the Field Development Grant are Francesca Benatti and David King of The Open University for their project, “A question of style: individual voices and corporate identity in the Edinburgh Review, 1814-20”.
The winner of the Linda H. Peterson Fellowship is Tom Mole, Reader in English Literature and Director of the Centre for the History of the Book at the University of Edinburgh, for his project: “Periodicals and the Policing of Culture, 1802-1828”.
See the abstracts of these projects and learn more about these grants in Grants and Prizes on the RSVP website.
Colby Book Prize winner for 2015 announced
The Colby Prize committee of RSVP is pleased to announce that the winner of the prize for the best book in this field published in 2015 is Mary L. Shannon for Dickens, Reynolds, and Mayhew on Wellington Street: The Print Culture of a Victorian Street, from Routledge. Honorable Mention goes to Marianne VanRemoortel for Women, Work, and the Victorian Periodical: Living by the Press, from Palgrave/Macmillan. Many congratulations to Mary and Marianne!