About RSVP Conferences
The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals holds its annual conference each summer or early fall at a different location in North America or Europe, on a theme relating to Victorian culture and society as reflected in its periodicals. RSVP offers a limited number of travel awards for graduate students and independent or retired scholars to assist with the costs of presenting at the conference. All those giving a paper at the RSVP conference are required to be members of the Society.
Applications to present at the conference are closed but registration to attend is now open!
This year’s conference engages with the theme of currents – currency, undercurrents, and crosscurrents – in the Victorian periodical press.
Held in Normandy, where history reverberated through local and global communities, the RSVP Conference in Caen invites scholars to consider currents in the Victorian periodical press. The conference topic invokes not only the news – the representation of current affairs and topicality in the press – but also issues relating to progress and change in periodical titles,
themes, forms, and roles over time. We are also interested in the notion of currency in
business, industry, and information, as well as in the actual financial workings of periodicals and publishers. Undercurrents and crosscurrents allude to divergences and convergences as well as trends and influences, both in the Victorian periodical press and in twenty-first-century periodicals scholarship.
Currents
- How do periodical forms – or their iterations across time and space – suggest notions
of currents and flow? - How are flows of information contained, redirected, or impeded by the
periodical press? - How are periodical rhythms altered by economics, taxes, the health of the
editor, the vagaries of the marketplace, etc.? - How was the experience of war and other current events in distant geographic locales represented and contested in the periodical press?
- How is our study of the periodical press informed by de-colonial, pan-European, and/or transatlantic currents and perspectives?
- How have recent advancements in digital remediation of periodicals and newspapers affected the way we conceive of global, regional, and local periodical discourse?
Currency
- How might the idea of currency influence our study of individual titles or particular
formats (e.g., monthlies vs. weeklies)? - How did worker strikes, trade embargoes, pandemics, new scientific ideas, agitations for equal rights, etc., influence the shape of the periodical press?
- How was this reflected in the starts, stops, and adaptations associated with particular periodical titles?
- How did the periodical press respond to/construct ideas of xenophobia and protectionism?
Undercurrents
- How is the “mainstream” in periodical publishing challenged or undergirded by divergent undercurrents/alternative publications from the resisting margins of counterculture (based on race, gender, sex, class, and locality), both within the UK and its colonies/dominions as well as across Europe and North America?
- How might Continental European and British periodical cultures be in synch or in oppositional relationship to each other?
Crosscurrents
- How might our scholarship engage with global economies, newspapers, travel,
and international publication networks? - How might it theorize crosscurrents between local and provincial papers, networks, and readerships?
- How are inclusion/exclusion, as well as differences in language and dialect (e.g., the representation of local/foreign accents), registered in the periodical press?
Hybrid Options
We plan to make plenaries and keynote addresses available in a hybrid format. We are also planning for a limited number of slots for remote presentations in a hybrid setup at the local conference. When submitting your abstract to the portal, an option for “remote presentation required” will be provided. If you have any questions regarding this hybrid option, please email the conference organizers.