RSVP

The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals

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Subscribe to the RSVP Newsletter

Stay up-to-date with the latest research and exciting opportunities related to the fascinating world of Victorian periodicals with RSVP’s monthly newsletter.

As an international research society dedicated to the study of nineteenth-century newspapers and magazines, we’re proud to support and facilitate research on all aspects of Victorian periodicals.

Whether you’re a seasoned researcher or just starting to explore the world of Victorian media, our newsletter is an invaluable resource that will inform and inspire you.

All RSVP members are subscribers to the monthly newsletter. Become an RSVP member today and join our community of Victorian periodicals researchers!

Want to Get the Word Out?

Are you aware of any exciting event, academic, or professionalization opportunities that would interest RSVP members? Please contact our Communications Coordinator, Mary Grant, by the 6th of each month with any items for inclusion in the monthly RSVP Newsletter.

Image credit: ‘New Letter-Box, at Paris,’ Wood engraving, 1850. Courtesy of Granger Academic.

Need Help With Periodical Research?

RSVP Digital Events can help! Join us Friday, April 7 for our first “Collaborative Learning and Troubleshooting” workshop with Jiwon Min on “The Making and Unmaking of Krakatau: Reading Nineteenth Century Periodicals, the Volcano and Climate Change.” The workshop will take place Friday, April 7 at 8 a.m. PST / 11 a.m. EST / 4 p.m. GMT.

Front page of Krakatau Internationale Courant (22 Sept. 1883)

Jiwon will share international media coverage (newspapers and periodicals that relied on telegraphs and new underwater cables), weather observations and maps (that deployed a range of illustrative technologies), and other accounts in the periodical press. The Krakatau eruption and these reports fueled scientific investigations, as well as the literary imagination (Alfred Tennyson, Gerald Manley Hopkins, and M.P Shiel) and art (Frederick Edwin Church and William Ascroft). Jiwon brings these materials together and considers the role of the press in producing global ecological interconnectedness and a phenomenon called “weather weirding.”

Jiwon Min is a postdoctoral fellow in the English Department at University of Delaware. Her research interests are in nineteenth-century British literature and culture, Victorian ecologies, the Gothic, and climate change narratives in fiction and non-fiction.

Join us April 7

 RSVP digital events are free and open to the public. Complete the brief registration form below to receive the Zoom link.

Register Here

CFP: RSVP at MLA 2024

Special Session: Celebration and Commemoration in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals

The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP) seeks proposals for a special session at the 2024 Modern Language Convention in Philadelphia, in keeping with the presidential theme of Celebration: Joy and Sorrow. We welcome abstracts of 250-400 words on any aspect of celebration and/or commemoration within the nineteenth-century periodical press. Topics
might include:

  • Representations of celebrations and commemorations in nineteenth-century periodicals,
    including weddings, balls, holidays, memorials and funerals;
  • Royal celebrations and commemorations in the nineteenth-century press, including jubilees,
    coronations, royal birthdays, births of heirs, and funerals;
  • The food and drink of nineteenth-century celebrations and commemorations as they appear
    in the press, including menus, recipes, pubs, picnics, and restaurants;
  • Nineteenth-century domestic ideology in the press and celebration, commemoration, joy,
    and sorrow;
  • The celebration and commemoration of technical achievements (the railways, the
    transatlantic cable, etc) in the press;
  • Joy, humor, pleasure, comedy, slapstick, and humor in the nineteenth-century press;
  • Sorrow, melancholy, grief, and mourning in the nineteenth-century press;
  • Celebrations and commemorations within nineteenth-century serial fiction;
  • The design, contents, and rhetoric of special or commemorative issues;
  • Christmas special issues and supplements;
  • The visual rhetoric and technology of the nineteenth-century press as applied to celebrations,
    commemorations, joy, and sorrow (page design, illustration, photography);
  • Celebrations and commemoration among communities of publishers, editors, writers,
    printers, and others who produced periodicals (the Punch Brotherhood and others);
  • Celebrations and commemorative events within periodical studies.

Send Your Proposal In by March 13, 2023

Please send abstracts and a 1-page C.V. to Natalie Houston by March 13, 2023. Applicants do not need to be members of RSVP to submit. Authors of
accepted papers must be (or become) members of MLA by April 7.

Want to Learn About the Indian Punch?

Cover page of Avadh Punch 1878
Cover page of Avadh Punch, 1878. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

RSVP’s Digital Events committee is pleased to welcome Maryam Sikander for our next virtual event. As the inaugural presenter in our Speaker’s Forum series, Maryam will deliver a talk titled “Avadh Punch (1877-1938): Transformation of Colonial Text and Context” on Wednesday, March 1 at 8 a.m. PST / 11 a.m. EST / 4 p.m. GMT / 9:30 p.m. IST.

Maryam Sikander is a Junior Fellow at Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi. She was awarded our 2021 Sally Mitchell Dissertation Prize for her PhD thesis which she completed at SOAS University of London in 2021. Her thesis explored the relationship between the Victorian magazine Punch and its Indian rendition Avadh Punch. Previously, she has also been awarded a Curran Fellowship by RSVP to further her research on Anglo-Indian Punches.

Join Us March 1

As always, RSVP digital events are free and open to the public. Complete the brief registration form below to receive the Zoom link.

Register Now

Digital Events Return Feb. 3 with “Pick A Periodical”

RSVP’s Digital Events Committee is back in action!

We’re delighted that Lorraine Janzen Kooistra will inaugurate our year’s events on Friday, February 3 at 8 a.m. PST/10 a.m. CST/ 11 a.m. EST / 4 p.m. GMT. She will be guiding attendees in the first of our recurring “Pick a Periodical” event series with a discussion of Volume 5 (April 1895) of The Yellow Book.

What Is Pick A Periodical?

Pick A Periodical is a new event series we will host…periodically…in which we ask a scholar and member of RSVP to select an issue (or range) of a newspaper or periodical that we will circulate ahead of time. Attendees should browse the issue prior to the event. Drawing on the lead’s expertise and attendees’ observations, our event time will be devoted to discussing what everyone found revelatory, fascinating, perplexing, or otherwise interesting about the issue(s) in question. In so doing, we hope to generate collaborative discussion, collective learning, and congenial conversation!

Join Us February 3

As with most RSVP digital events, this event is free and open to all, though we welcome and encourage you to become a member of RSVP if you are not already one. You will receive a Zoom link info upon registration. We hope to see you there!

Register Now

Why Volume 5 of The Yellow Book?

Dr. Kooistra has selected Volume 5 (April 1895) of The Yellow Book (open access!) to kick off our first “Pick a Periodical” event on February 3. The Yellow Book offers a unique opportunity to read a single issue of a magazine in relation to its editorial processes and title’s overall brand in the context of an international media event and its fallout. The April 1895 arrest of Oscar Wilde, who was carrying a yellow-bound book (mistakenly identified by the press as the “Yellow Book,” but actually a French novel), resulted in the firing of Aubrey Beardsley as art editor of the magazine, and the removal of his illustrations from the volume before it went to print.

Since then, scholarship has typically examined The Yellow Book along the fault line of before and after Beardsley. The actual contents of the watershed Volume 5—its selections, deletions, substitutions, sequences, and adjacencies—have received only minimal attention.

Dr. Kooistra will open the discussion by drawing attention to a single artwork, Constantin Guys’ “A Sketch.” We’ll then turn to your observations, comments, thoughts, and questions about the volume, its contents, contiguities, images, etc.

Register for this FREE event here

Stay Tuned for More Events in 2023

In addition to our “Pick a Periodical” series, Digital Events has many other kinds of events planned, including:

  • A Speaker’s Forum, where we hear of members’ work
  • Periodic Support sessions, or informal sessions for troubleshooting and solving research and pedagogical questions
  • A Reading Group, in which we discuss an important, relevant, or thought-provoking piece of scholarship within periodical studies

We have a full slate – an event almost every month! – and hope you will join us as RSVP continues to build community and intellectual exchanges through multimodal events and communication.

Call for Contributors to RSVP Bibliography

We Need Your Help!

RSVP seeks contributors to its biennial bibliography, which will be published in Victorian Periodicals Review in Fall 2023.

Contributors to the bibliography are asked to adopt three to ten scholarly journals from a list, identify articles published between December 2017 and December 2020 that have direct relevance to the study of Victorian journalism, and compile a list of annotated entries.

All contributors are acknowledged in the published bibliography. Entries will be due in May 2023.

If you are interested in contributing to this project or can recommend someone, please email Dr. Kristin Kondrlik at for the complete guidelines and list of journals.