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Using the Curran Index: Experiences, Search, and Improvements (Focus Group)

17 March 2022 from 6-7:30pm (GMT) /2-3:30pm (EDT)

Dr. Lara Atkin and Dr. Emily Bell, editors of the Curran Index, invite Victorianist researchers and teachers to attend this focus group to feed directly into planned changes to the search and navigation of the Index. The Curran Index is a treasure trove of information about who was writing the articles, reviews, stories, novels, and poems of the Victorian periodical press. This is an opportunity to discuss your experience and issues using the existing Index interface, and provide feedback on what would be most useful to you as a researcher moving forward.

Register to attend the focus group here. Registration is free and open to all.

We’d Like Your Input on Improving the Curran Index

The Curran Index features over 168,000 contributions to influential 19th-century British weeklies, monthlies, quarterlies, and annuals. The current website was launched in 2017, and we are about to undertake some exciting work to improve the speed, layout and search function of the Index. We invite any Victorianist teacher or researcher, at any career stage, inside or outside of the academy, to come along and share their views.

In this session, we will show the current Curran Index interface and outline the proposed changes. Then, we will open up discussion around the following points:

1. Have you used the Curran Index in your research? If so, what for (e.g. was it to look up a specific author, or periodical, or article)? If not, why not?
2. How easy or difficult do you find it to navigate around the website? Please give a rating on a scale of 1-5 (where 1 is easy and 5 is difficult) and explain your answer.
3. How easy was it to find the information you were looking for? Which facets did you use to narrow your search?
4. What kind of information would you expect to see on the homepage? What are the most important search filters for your research?
5. Would a Curran Index blog with research case studies of how the index has been used by other researchers be useful to you?
6. What other information would you expect to find on the website?
7. What additional features would be useful?

Have Ideas But Can’t Attend the Focus Group?

The Research Society of Victorian Periodicals seeks proposals for a Special Session at the
January 5-8, 2023 MLA convention in San Francisco, in keeping with the presidential theme of
“Working Conditions” (News from the MLA 2023 Presidential Theme: Working Conditions).

We welcome abstracts of 250-400 words on all aspects of work and working conditions within
and represented by the nineteenth-century press. We particularly welcome proposals oriented
toward social justice issues that cross geographic (including oceanic) borders and that offer
intersectional approaches to race, class, and gender.

Topics might include:

• Hierarchies of working conditions in periodical production and distribution
• Outsourcing of press labor
• Reforms of working conditions and their national and international press coverage
• Periodical representations of enslaved and oppressed laborers, including colonial workers
• New archival sources for investigating working conditions demanded by periodical production
• Periodical representations of work conditions for educators (a special focus of the 2023
  Presidential Theme) in day schools, boarding schools, universities, and those emerging after the 1870 Education Act
• Sensational exposés of working conditions as sensation journalism and/or reformist interventions
• Press coverage of Parliamentary debates about working conditions
• Royal Commission investigations of working conditions in periodical reports and editorials, and
  their inspiration in fiction and poetry
• New approaches to Henry Mayhew’s documentation of workers and working conditions in
  newspaper, periodical, and book form
• Working-class periodicals and workers
• The use of sentimentality, empathy, and rage in press coverage of working conditions
• Global and local working conditions in the digitizing of nineteenth-century periodicals

Please send proposals and a short bio or 1-page c.v. to Linda K. Hughes by 10 March 2022.

The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP) and the Scottish Centre for Victorian and Neo-Victorian Studies (SCVS) presents

Four Nations and Beyond:

Periodical Studies and National Identities in the British Isles and Ireland

Trades Hall, Glasgow
20 May 2022

This one-day workshop will explore how Victorian periodical and newspaper cultures operated in the different nations of the British Isles and Ireland, and in their diaspora cultures that emerged through emigration and imperialism. We hope to interrogate how periodicals constructed Irish, Scottish and Welsh identities, in relation to or in opposition to a range of ‘English’ identities, as well as examining how such English identities were unmade and remade in coeval relation with the neighbouring countries it governed. We welcome papers that investigate whether and how distinctive periodical cultures emerged in Ireland, Scotland and Wales, or in relation to English sites outside London and its environs. Were there distinct English regional identities centred on, for instance, Cornwall, Yorkshire, or the England-Wales or England-Scotland border areas?

Our inclusion of ‘beyond’ in the title speaks to ongoing interest in periodicals and newspapers in settler cultures and diasporic communities: how were these identities constructed outside Britain and Ireland in relation to indigenous cultures and other immigrant cultures? We ask too how transimperial dynamics put pressure on the ways in which globally circulating English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh periodicals articulate conceptions of the nation that ‘seem to cohere along a continuum that fuses a geoethnically bound sense of place with time’ (Sukanya Banerjee).

We are especially interested in exploring the still underexamined aspects of linguistic distinctiveness and papers centred on Welsh, Irish, Scots, Gaelic, Ulster-Scots, Manx or English regional dialects are encouraged. Proposals that focus on an individual publication, or that reflect on periodical or newspaper culture more broadly—including reflecting on the usefulness or otherwise of the ‘four nations’ as a concept and frame within Victorian periodical studies as we continue to widen our understanding of what we mean by ‘Victorian’—are also welcome.

A One-Day Conference in Glasgow

We anticipate that this workshop will take place in person in the Trades Hall in Glasgow city centre, conforming to guidelines and best practice in relation to social distancing and other regulations. We will provide opportunities to participate remotely, and will make linked content available online. Please signal in your submission if you would not be able to attend in person.

Registration for the workshop is funded by the SCVS at the University of Strathclyde and will be free up to a maximum of 30 participants.

Travel Bursaries Available

RSVP will award five travel bursaries of £200 for PG/ECR/Independent Scholar participants who do not have other access to institutional funding. If you would like to apply for these bursaries, please state so in your submission.

Proposals Now Accepted Through 18 March 2022

Proposals should be emailed to 4nationsandbeyond@gmail.com and should consist of a 250 word abstract and a 5-line biography. The deadline for proposals is Friday, 18 March 2022. Participants will be notified shortly thereafter.

We encourage advance submission of your presentation as a recorded presentation (max. 15 minutes) or draft paper (max. 2,500 words) so it can be shared with registered participants who are not attending in person (should there be any issues on the day with online streaming). Pre-submissions should be received by 6 May 2022.

Kirstie Blair, University of Strathclyde

Fionnuala Dillane, on behalf of RSVP