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VPR CFP: Special Issue on “Keywords”

Detail from Mary McLeod, “The Owl’d Homestead,” Atalanta 6, no. 63 (Dec. 1892). Courtesy of the Digital Victorian Periodical Poetry Project (DVPP).
Download the CFP

Proposals Due March 30

In 2027, Victorian Periodicals Review (VPR) will celebrate its 60th anniversary. We are taking this historic occasion to capture the state of our field in a VPR special issue on “Keywords.” We are not seeking historical overviews or to replicate the expansive, definitional work of the Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism of Great Britain and Ireland (Brake and Demoor, eds., 2009). Rather, for this special issue, inspired by similar projects in adjacent and related areas,* we invite short contributions (1,200-word maximum) to stake a claim for a “keyword.”

Your keyword might foreground conceptual stakes, provoke a redirection in our scholarship, or confirm the importance of an approach. You might take the opportunity to centre a keyword for an agenda-setting piece that positions a concept or term as important for research in the field now. Your contribution might include how a periodical studies approach to a keyword reframes wider conversations about that term or concept. Or you might consider how a keyword from related or adjacent fields helps us to see or situate the press in the long nineteenth century in new ways.

Proposals of 50-100 words should be emailed to the guest editors (Jim Mussell, Maria Damkjær, and Fionnuala Dillane) by March 30, 2026. The deadline for final submissions is July 1, 2026.

Possible keywords include:

  • Abundance
  • Advertisements
  • Affect
  • Anonymity
  • Archive
  • Article
  • Assemblages
  • Circulation
  • Column
  • Community
  • Compression
  • Departments
  • Design
  • Distraction
  • Ecologies/Environments
  • Edges
  • Empire
  • Editor
  • Ephemera
  • Endings
  • Extracts
  • Extraction
  • Flow
  • Front Page
  • Genre
  • Gutter
  • Illustration
  • Imitation
  • Index
  • Information
  • Infrastructure
  • Intersectionality
  • Margins
  • Mastheads
  • Materiality
  • Mediality
  • Multimodality
  • Networks
  • Newspaper
  • Numbers
  • Ornament
  • Paper
  • Parts/Wholes
  • Polyvocality
  • Print
  • Reader
  • Repetition
  • Reuse
  • Rhythms
  • Scale
  • Scissors-and-Paste
  • Seriality
  • Time
  • Transauthorial
  • Transnational
  • Type
  • Volume
  • Victorian

These suggestions are a provocation or starting point, not a set list. We invite you to select one, adapt one, or make an alternative suggestion.

How To Submit Your Proposal

Please direct queries and/or proposals (your keyword with a very brief 50-100 word rationale) to the guest editors (Jim Mussell, Maria Damkjær, and Fionnuala Dillane) at RSVPkeywords@gmail.com by March 30, 2026. 

The deadline for final submissions (max. 1,200 words) will be July 1, 2026.

*See, for example, Ablow and Hack, eds., “Keywords,” special issue, Victorian Literature and Culture, vols. 3 and 4, 2018.