RSVP

The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals

webmaster@rs4vp.org

Announcing the Sally Mitchell Dissertation Prize

Black-and-white portrait of scholar Sally MitchellThe Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP) invites submissions for the Sally Mitchell dissertation prize. This prize will recognize the best Ph.D. dissertation, defended in 2020, that explores the 19th-century British periodical press (including magazines, newspapers, and serial publications of all kinds) as an object of study in its own right, and not only as a source of material for other historical topics. We welcome projects from a range of disciplinary perspectives focused on any aspect of the periodical press within Britain itself or in the many countries, within and outside of the Empire, where British magazines and newspapers were bought, sold, and read during “the long nineteenth century” (ca. 1780-1914).

The winner will receive a monetary award of $1,000.

How to Apply

Applicants should submit the following via the Fluid Review application portal by March 1, 2021:

  • A cover letter with full contact information
  • A title page, abstract and table of contents
  • A sample chapter (do not submit the full dissertation with these materials)
  • The name and email address of your dissertation advisor

Applicants’ dissertation advisors will be asked to confirm the successful viva/defense date.

After reviewing these materials, the prize committee will solicit full dissertations for further consideration. Applications will be accepted beginning February 1, 2021. The Mitchell Prize winner will be announced in July or August of 2021.

Questions about this dissertation prize may be directed to the president of RSVP at president@rs4vp.com.

About Sally Mitchell

The Sally Mitchell Dissertation Award was named in honor of Sally Mitchell, a longstanding and highly valued member of RSVP who served on the organization’s board and on its senior advisory committee. She was the author of five books, including the biography Frances Power Cobbe: Victorian Feminist, Journalist, Reformer and The New Girl: Girl’s Culture in England, 1880-1915. Much of her work focused on women writers, women’s history, the social history of the period, and the role of periodicals. Sally Mitchell was a committed and ardent mentor of graduate students and worked hard to advance their careers.

Join us for Some Holiday Cheer Dec. 17

Join the RSVP Digital Salon committee for a holiday-themed (virtual) social gathering this Thursday, December 17 at 1 p.m. EST / 6 p.m. UK. We’ll share a sneak peak at some upcoming virtual events we have planned for 2021, including:

    • A Discussion on Decolonising Periodical Studies (JAN. 2021): A practice-based session with experts at the intersection of critical race studies/transimperialism and periodical studies. We hope to use this discussion gauge interest in starting up a monthly reading group on this very important topic.
    • Maximizing Your Online Periodical Research (FEB. 2021): A roundtable on how to make the most of your virtual resources. Geared toward graduate students, but all are welcome!
    • Teaching Periodical Studies Online (MAR. 2021): Come for and with your ideas on how to teach periodicals effectively online during this time when many must adapt their syllabi to distance learning.
    • Archival Research at a Distance (APR. 2021): How does one conduct archival work from home? Join us to learn about the innovative ways scholars and archivists have adapted their work when archival access is limited.
    • Doing Research as an Independent Scholar (MAY 2021): RSVP has always been a place where scholars of all kinds can share their work. Our panel of independent scholars will share their tips and tricks for researching with limited access to databases, applying for grants, maintaining your scholarship from outside the university setting, and much more!

Bring your own holiday beverage of choice, your favorite mince pie/cookie recipe, and let’s share a cup of cheer this holiday season.

Register in advance for this event here:

https://washington.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJIqfuqrpj0tHdVoPFg3aZ4RPbKaiKLS5yoR

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing a link and information about how to join the Zoom meeting. We hope to see you there!

Happy Holidays from the Curran Index

By Patrick Leary

This year the Curran Index has a special holiday surprise for Victorianists everywhere.  In this latest update from longtime editor Gary Simons, the names of the authors of tens of thousands of unsigned contributions to three hugely influential Victorian periodicals — Punch, the Athenaeum, and the Saturday Review — are now freely available to researchers through the Curran Index database.

What’s New

The Index currently identifies the authors of almost 80,000 contributions (both prose and verse) published in Punch between 1848 and 1900. These were drawn from the manuscript ledgers in the Punch Collection of the British Library by Clare Horrocks, Valerie Stevenson, and their team at Liverpool John Moores University, who generously made their work available for integration into the Curran Index.  There are many fun surprises here.

Few book reviews were more influential than those carried every week in the pages of the Athenaeum.  With the cooperation of City University, London, whose library holds a marked file of the journal, and the generous assistance of Marysa Demoor of Ghent University, who made her own research available, over 58,000 Athenaeum articles (and some verse) published between 1830 and 1900 are now listed in the Curran Index.  Much of this work involved painstakingly checking records against the notations in the volumes at City.  The identifications now accessible through the Index include the astonishing record of novelist Geraldine Jewsbury, who published over 2200 reviews in the journal between 1848 and her death in 1880.

The famously disdainful Saturday Review holds a special place in the history of the Victorian press.  Working with many different sources, Gary has assembled author identifications for over 4500 articles published from 1855 to 1900 in this much talked about magazine, including such prominent intellectuals as E. A. Freeman, Mark Pattison, Andrew Lang, and John Addington Symonds.

Attribution Matters

An unsigned essay of ‘Little Women’ would mean one thing if it was written by Harriet Martineau and quite another if the author turned out to be Eliza Lynn Linton. (Which, by the way, it did.) There’s a big difference between being able to write, “Popular playwright and longtime civil servant Tom Taylor observed in Punch that..” and instead having to write, simply, “Punch observed…”  (Periodicals don’t write things; we only pretend that they do when we don’t know any better.)  Thanks to this kind of work, many long-neglected authors as well as many others whose writings have been entirely unknown, are now emerging from the shadows of anonymity, opening up countless opportunities for fresh scholarly study.

These latest additions are the fruits of three years of steady work by Dr. Gary Simons.  Gary’s remarkable editorship of the Curran Index — whose stages are documented, however briefly, in the Release Notes section of the site — will be coming to an end this year as he moves on to other projects.  I’d like to take this opportunity (and future ones, too) to thank him for all that he has accomplished over the past seven years in building this extraordinary resource. Eileen Curran would be very proud.

CFP: Special Issue of VPR for Summer 2022

Guest editors Laurel Brake, Fionnuala Dillane, and Mark Turner invite essays of 5,000-7,000 words in length (including notes and bibliography) for Victorian Periodical Review‘s next special issue, “The Book Review in the Long Nineteenth Century,” to be published Summer 2022.

Book reviews, reviewing, and reviewers pervade the nineteenth-century press, but scholarly attention to the genre, the practice, and to reviewer networks is disproportionately sparse. The genre of reviews filled the early nineteenth-century quarterlies to the extent that they were known generically as Reviews. While retaining their name, Reviews transformed their frequency and contents, surviving as monthly miscellanies, without losing their claim to superior status among magazines, newspapers, and weeklies that also published reviews in profusion and in diverse forms. Although unheralded as a form, they occupied a significant space in weeklies such as the Athenaeum, Spectator, Literary Gazette, and Saturday Review and monthlies such as the Review of Reviews. Many dailies developed literary supplements that functioned as review spaces. The book review, this defining feature of our objects of study, has yet to receive sustained critical attention.

Topics To Consider

This special issue seeks to invite scrutiny of reviews across the press in the long nineteenth century as cultural objects and cultural practices, alive to questions of class, gender, race, and nationality. Submissions might address any of the following:

    • The Review and book reviews
    • Taxonomies, forms, and genres (e.g., occasional notes; causeries; notices; essays-like-review; review-like-essay)
    • Exclusions and/or inclusions
    • Hierarchies of print
    • Critical language of book reviews
    • Conventions of book reviewing
    • Book review as dialogue
    • Cultural value of the book review
    • Repurposing, remediating, recycling book reviews
    • Uses of anonymity and/or signature (including pseudonyms)
    • Affects of the book review
    • The book review in regional, national, and/or transnational contexts
    • Economics of the book review
    • Book review networks/Networks of print
    • The book review in relation to other reviewing practices/forms (e.g., of performances; art exhibitions; concerts)
    • Editing review pages
    • Politics of the book review
    • The book review and the development of disciplines

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Submit Your Abstract by 15 January 2021

Please signal your interest by 15 January 2021 with a 200-word abstract and brief (50-word) biography. Responses will be sent by 15 February 2021.

Submission deadline for final draft of selected articles of 5,000-7,000 words in length (including notes and bibliography) is 15 August 2021 for publication in 2022.

Both abstracts and final essays should be submitted to Laurel, Mark and Fionnuala by emailing 19cReviewing@gmail.com. You may download a PDF of these guidelines here for reference.

CFA: We’re Seeking a New Editor for the Curran Index

The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP) seeks a highly qualified scholar to serve as Editor of the Curran Index (curranindex.org). This ongoing, open-access project is devoted to the compilation and dissemination of attribution research that identifies the authors of anonymous articles, reviews, verse, and fiction in the periodical press of Britain and its empire in the long 19th century.

The successful candidate will have at their disposal up to $10,000 (U.S.) annually to defray expenses of attribution research and maintenance of the database. Such expenses include those related to travel, scanning, database subscriptions, and other costs directly associated with attribution research using archival, online, and published sources, as well as the timely entry of the results of that research into the Curran Index database.

Applications are due November 1, 2020.

Requirements and Responsibilities

The successful applicant will serve for a two-year, renewable term. The core requirements of the Editor position include extensive experience with both:

  1. The field of Victorian periodical research, and
  2. Building and managing relational databases

Additionally, the Editor of the Curran Index will be responsible for:

  1. Maintaining the database
  2. Expanding the Curran Index in innovative and challenging ways, by seeking attribution data on periodicals with a variety of aims, formats, authorial communities, and readerships
  3. Reporting throughout the year to the Curran Index Advisory Committee

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Please consult the position announcement for further details about the position.

How to Apply

RSVP welcomes applications from qualified and experienced scholars of all ages and backgrounds. Short-listed candidates will be interviewed. Please submit a CV and cover letter to Jennifer Phegley at president@rs4vp.org by November 1, 2020. Any questions may be addressed to her as well. The position is funded by a grant drawn from the generous bequest left to RSVP by the estate of Eileen Curran (1927-2013).

We Want Your Input on Future Digital Events!

Tell Us What You Think

In addition to the RSVP Digital Salon, we’d like to gauge RSVP members’ interest in attending any other virtual event(s) this upcoming academic year (Fall 2020-Spring 2021). To that end, we’ve created a brief survey to collect your thoughts. Your input will drive our efforts to help us stay connected during this time, so thank you in advance!

Please take a moment to fill out the survey here: https://forms.gle/ECRfYZKSWTaAi4fh8. It shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes or so of your time to fill out.