Pick-a-Periodical with Katherine D. Harris
The Forget Me Not for 1825 and 1833
RSVP is excited to welcome Katherine D. Harris to our next Pick-a-Periodical digital event on Friday, March 6. In a talk entitled “The Racial Anxieties of Polite Culture in the Forget Me Not British Literary Annual,” she will walk us through two volumes of the periodical: 1825 and 1833.
The Forget Me Not, a literary annual title that first appeared in 1823, led the revolution in combining the almanac, women’s conduct manuals, and emblem books. It reflects both the expanding British empire’s social imagination and the racial anxieties of polite culture. In duodecimo with 40-50 literary texts by a variety of authors accompanied by 10-12 engravings, the annuals represent a type of periodical masquerading as luxury. Published annually until 1847 with the same editorial voice year after year, the Forget Me Not offers a view of empire as a benevolent global order, though both the editor and publisher are German immigrants to England.
During this event, Dr. Harris will offer a brief history of the annuals and then dive into the engravings and short stories, “Sacontala,” in the 1825 volume and “Uncle Anthony’s Blunder” in the 1833 volume. As with all Pick-a-Periodical events, participants are encouraged to peruse these two volumes in advance via the following digital surrogates:
Both volumes were published by Rudolph Ackermann and edited by Frederic Shoberl.
About Our Speaker
Katherine D. Harris is Director of Public Programming, Outreach & Advocacy for the College of Humanities & the Arts and Professor of Literature & Digital Humanities at San Jose State University. She is the creator and author of Forget Me Not: The Rise of the British Literary Annual, a legacy digital archive on literary annuals, and a print edition focusing on British nineteenth-century literary annuals and Gothic short stories. She also co-edited the award-winning un-book, Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities, which focuses on valuing pedagogy as scholarship. She is the 2025 recipient of the Patrick Leary Resource Development Grant and is developing an open-access, full-text collection of the most popular literary annual titles held in the Internet Archive, with linked open data to be shared with the Curran Index.
