RSVP

The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals

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Peterson Award Winner Announced

RSVP is pleased to announce Mary Shannon as the 2021-2022 recipient of the Peterson Fellowship for her project on “Billy Waters, Periodicals, and Nineteenth-Century Popular Culture.” Committee members lauded her work on Billy Waters, a Black entertainer who received coverage in the transatlantic periodical press, as “a fascinating and timely project.” They also noted its potential to contribute to current critical conversations about “undisciplining” Victorian studies, about “vernacular culture” in its complexity, and about disability in the Victorian period.

Congratulations to Mary and thanks to all who submitted applications for this year’s award!

Congratulations to Our Prize Winners!

We have a number of exciting announcements regarding our annual prizes and awards. Read on for project details for our Field Development Grant, Colby Book Prize, and inaugural Sally Mitchell Dissertation Prize. Congratulations to all our winners and many thanks to all who submitted projects for consideration!

Congrats to Our Field Development Grant Winner

This year’s recipients of the RSVP Field Development Grant are Dino Felluga, Adrian Wisnicki, and Kenneth Crowell, for their project, “Recovering BIPOC Voices from the Victorian Periodical Press.”

The decision committee deemed this project “a master class in decolonial recovery work that could offer a powerful intervention in the current state of the field’s methodological representation.”

Inaugural Sally Mitchel Dissertation Prize Winner

This year’s recipient of our first-ever Sally Mitchell Dissertation Prize is Ann Hale, for her project, “Business Matters: Legal Structures, Roles, People, and Places in the Nineteenth-Century Press—A Case Study of George Newnes Limited.”

The decision committee offered the following comments on Hale’s project:

“In her comprehensive and compelling study of George Newnes Limited, Ann Hale’s [dissertation] uncovers and assesses the vital role of business and legal frameworks in the periodical press. Her project enables readers to better appreciate the consequences of sole proprietorship, partnerships, and companies and the mutability of these legal and business structures. Drawing on an impressive array of documents, visualizations, maps, and other data as part of a Scalar Digital Supplement, she constructs a carefully scaffolded study that draws well on existing periodicals scholarship and literary theory, including the idea of the chronotope, Guillory’s ideas of remediation, and Linda Hughes’ ‘sideways theory,’ along the way bringing numerous hidden players in the publishing work to light and convincing her readers why, as her title tells us, ‘Business Matters.’”

Two other outstanding dissertations received honourable mentions from the decision committee: Victoria Clarke’s “Reading and Writing the Northern Star, 1837-1847” and Stephan Pigeon’s “The Labour, Law, and Practice of Circulating Journalisms in the British News and Periodical Press, 1842-1911.”

2021 Robert and Vineta Colby Book Prizes Announced

This year, two awardees were selected: The Periodical Press in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, by Elizabeth Tilley, and The Edinburgh History of the British and Irish Press: Volume 2, Expansion and Evolution, 1800-1900, edited by David Finkelstein. Both awardees have been invited to give a keynote lecture at this year’s RSVP conference.

The committee offered the following comments on the two texts:

Elizabeth Tilley, The Periodical Press in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Palgrave, 2020)

In her monograph, Elizabeth Tilley focuses on monthly and weekly periodicals, selecting representative journals to give an overview of Irish periodical literature throughout the century, a subject that certainly deserves this type of focused attention. Her research (funded by a Curran Award in 2015) is impeccable, and her analysis is nuanced and detailed. Tilley often chooses to address little-known periodicals (domestic, trade, popular press, etc.), demonstrating their contributions to the Irish periodical field and their interactions with regional and national politics and economics, as well as showcasing their relevance to British periodical culture.

As part of this study, Tilley has included a lengthy appendix with excerpts from a series of articles by Christopher Clinton Hoey that were originally published in The Irish Builder in 1877-78. These excerpts give an overview of the Irish press during the period and provide an excellent resource for both scholarly research and teaching. In this way, Tilley’s volume is both monograph and scholarly edition, a notable and important resource for the field of nineteenth-century periodical studies.

David Finkelstein, ed., The Edinburgh History of the British and Irish Press: Volume 2, Expansion and Evolution, 1800-1900 (Edinburgh UP, 2020)

As part of a three-volume series from Edinburgh University press, David Finkelstein’s compendious collection includes contributions from forty-eight authors who address the development of British and Irish periodical culture throughout the nineteenth century. It is a remarkable resource that both draws from previous scholarship and contributes new knowledge to the field, with a wide range of topics and perspectives, and with welcome attention to diversity and transnational connections. The combination of overview essays accompanied by narrow and pointed case studies give the volume an impressive breadth and depth. It will be valuable for a wide range of readers, from those who are orienting and contextualizing as they first come to periodical studies, to those who are already specialists in the field.

David Finkelstein’s fine work editing and introducing the volume surely reflects a herculean effort, supported by original and engaging work by the forty-seven authors, who include both established and upcoming scholars. We are pleased to honor the work of all the writers as well as the editor, who together have made a contribution to nineteenth-century periodical studies that will remain a standard for many years to come.

Peterson Prize Winner TBD

Please note that the 2021 Linda H. Peterson Fellowship recipient will be announced shortly. We will share the announcement as it is available from the committee.

Join Our Last #RSVPDigitalSalon of the Spring

How can I keep up with my research if I pursue an “alt-ac” career?

How would I do research without access to my institution’s library databases and subscriptions?

Where can I find like-minded scholars who share my interests if I’m not pursuing higher education as a career?

What does it look like to work with non-academic publishers? 

In short, what does it take to be an “independent” scholar? 

In the wake of Covid-19’s impact, many have asked the above questions as they face a future where academic austerity threatens to become the “new normal.” While not all scholars seek academic positions, those who do often wonder what it takes to continue producing rigorous and satisfying research apart from the university setting.

RSVP has long supported independent researchers of all kinds whose interests intersect with the wide world and long history of Victorian periodicals. Join us on 21 May at 6 p.m. UK / 1 p.m. EST for our last RSVP Digital Salon of the spring on “Doing Research as an Independent Scholar.”

Register for this event here. Registration is free and open to the public. You do not need to be a member of RSVP to attend.

Get Your Questions About Independent Scholarship Answered

During this more informal Q&A session, our panelists will answer your questions live and offer their insights on how to do research when one is not affiliated with a university. Our panelists include: 

Judith Flanders

Judith Flanders is a journalist and highly acclaimed author of both fiction and non-fiction. In addition to her Sam Clair Mysteries series, she writes regularly about history, theatre, dance, and the contemporary arts for the Sunday Telegraph, Wall Street Journal, Spectator, TLS, and theartsdesk.com. Her most recent non-fiction book, A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order (2020), traces the history of using alphabetical order as a sorting system.

Helen Rappaport

Helen Rappaport is an international best-selling author, media consultant, and freelance historian who specialises in the period 1837-1918 in Britain and Russia. Her forthcoming books include a history of Russian emigration to Paris after the revolution in the US and a biography of Mary Seacole in the UK, both due out Spring 2022.

Marie Léger-St-Jean

Marie Léger-St-Jean is an independent scholar and digital humanist based in Montréal, where she edits Price One Penny: A Database of Cheap Literature, 1837-1860. Her research focuses on early Victorian fiction published in penny weekly numbers and its role as a nexus in a Western transmedia popular culture.

Patrick Leary

Patrick Leary is a former president and long-time member of RSVP. He is the founder/manager of the VICTORIA listserv, and he curates the Victoria Research Web, a treasure trove of Victorian research resources old and new. He also is the author of The Punch Brotherhood (2010), a prize-winning study of how oral culture shaped this iconic Victorian periodical.

Register and Submit Your Questions Now

Registration for this free event is open to all. You need not be a member of RSVP to attend and participate. And we highly encourage audience participation for this event! Our panelists are here to answer your questions about being an independent scholar. 

If desired, you can submit a question ahead of time. We will share your questions with the panelists in advance. We hope to see you there!

General questions about this or future Digital Salon events may be directed to our Vice President, Fionnuala Dillane.

Learn More About Zotero with RSVP

12 April 2021 at 1pm EST / 6pm UK
(12pm CST, 7pm Central Europe)

Do you keep hearing about the importance of using a reference management software? Are you concerned you’re not using yours to its full potential? This workshop will give an overview of the basics of Zotero. You will learn how to use this tool to keep track of citations and store primary or secondary research materials.

Join us on Monday, 12 April 2021 at 1pm EST / 6 pm UK for a walk through on setting up Zotero and how to use its many capabilities. Registration is free and open to all.

This event was inspired by our February RSVP Digital Salon brainstorming session, where members expressed much interest in reference management software.

A Hands-On Workshop

This will be a hands-on workshop, so please make sure you download and install the Zotero desktop app as well as the Zotero Connector plugin for the internet browser you use for research. Zotero is an open-source reference management software and free to use. If your library gets larger than 300 MB, you can choose to pay for back-ups. 

To use Zotero to its full potential, including back-ups and syncing on multiple devices, make sure to register for a free account too.

About Our Presenter

Marie Léger-St-Jean is an independent scholar and digital humanist based in Montréal. She researches early Victorian fiction published in penny weekly numbers and its role as a nexus in a Western transmedia popular culture. She has been using Zotero religiously for over a decade.

CFP: Multilingualism and Periodical Studies

Proposal for a Special Session at MLA 2022

In keeping with the MLA 2022 presidential theme of multilingualism, the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP) invites proposals for a special session on multilingualism in nineteenth-century periodicals and periodicals studies. How does periodicals studies confront monolingual biases or move beyond them? What research examples, collaborations, institutional conditions, or teaching practices facilitate or hinder multilingual periodicals scholarship and, by turn, the widening of nineteenth-century studies?

Submit 250-word abstracts to paul.fyfe@ncsu.edu by March 24, 2021. Applicants do not need to be RSVP members to submit — and feel encouraged to circulate this call to scholars and teachers in other fields.

Accepted panelists must be (or become) members of MLA and be able to attend the MLA convention in Washington, DC in January 2022.

Join Our Conversation on Teaching 19 March

Join us on 19 March 2021 at 5 pm UK / 1 pm EST for the next installment of our #RSVPDigitalSalon 2021 series, “Teaching With Nineteenth-Century Periodicals Online”! We’ll learn more about how to teach periodicals effectively online during a time when many have had to adapt their syllabi to distance learning. Our panelists and topics include:

Melissa H. Range, Using Digital Newspapers in Teaching Nineteenth Century African American Writers

Melissa Range is the author of two collections of poetry: Scriptorium, a winner of the 2015 National Poetry Series (Beacon Press, 2016), and Horse and Rider (Texas Tech University Press, 2010). Her third collection, in progress, is an archivally driven collection that examines the abolitionist movement in the nineteenth century United States. Range is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Originally from East Tennessee, she teaches creative writing and American literature at Lawrence University in Wisconsin.

Jennifer Phegley, Introducing Periodicals to Undergraduates: Serial Reading Blogs and Wiki Magazine Projects

Jennifer Phegley chairs the English Department at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. She is the author of Educating the Proper Woman Reader: Victorian Family Literary Magazines and the Cultural Health of the Nation and Courtship and Marriage in Victorian England as well as several edited collections and numerous articles on authorship, publishing, periodicals, and pedagogy. Her current project, Magazine Mavericks: Mary Elizabeth Braddon, John Maxwell, and the Emergence of New Readings Audiences in Mid-Victorian England, has been supported by a Harry Ransom Center Research Fellowship, a Curran Fellowship, and an NEH Summer Stipend. She started teaching online courses in 2010 and never looked back!

Lindsy Lawrence, Indexing Poetry in the Digital Classroom

Dr. Lindsy Lawrence is Professor of English at the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith. She has published work on Elizabeth Gaskell, serial poetry publication, and Neo-Victorian themes in contemporary television series such as Downton Abbey. Her recent publications include an article on women poets in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in Women, Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1830s-1900s: The Victorian Period (2019). She also published a recent article on the Victorian Christmas serial tradition in contemporary television and Doctor Who for the Journal of Neo-Victorian Studies. She teaches a variety of courses in composition, cultural studies, and eighteenth and nineteenth-century British literature with a focus on publication history, gender roles, and digital humanities. She is Co-Director of the Periodical Poetry Index.

James Mussell, “Mechanical exigencies” and the enabling difference: looking again at the look of the page

James Mussell is Associate Professor in Victorian Literature at the University of Leeds.  He is the author of Science, Time and Space in the Late Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press (2007) and The Nineteenth-Century Press in the Digital Age (2012).  He is one of the editors of the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018); and books on W.T. Stead (2012) and Oliver Lodge (2020).  He is currently working on a monograph, Whispers of Print, and an edited collection on letterpress printing.

Register Now

Register for this free online event here. Participation does not require RSVP membership and all are welcome to attend. If you have any questions about this event, please don’t hesitate to contact us and direct your inquiry to the Vice President.