RSVP

The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals

Awards News

2024 VPR Prize Winners Announced!

We are delighted to announce the winners of the 2024 VPR Prizes!

Expanding the Field into Indian Children’s Periodicals

This year’s Expanding the Field Prize goes to Nilkantha Pal (Indian Institute of Science Education and Research) for his essay “Imagining Childhood in Colonial Bengal: Children’s Periodicals, Readership, and Vernacular Publishing, ca. 1880-1920.”

This work impressed the judges “with its erudition, its broad scope of reference, and its nuanced application of Robert Darnton’s circulation model of print culture to a colonial context.” The Expanding the Field Prize is awarded annually for an outstanding essay that diversifies the existing geographic, racial, and ethnic composition of nineteenth-century periodical studies.

Our 2024 VanArsdel Prize Winner

The winner of this year’s VanArsdel Prize is Adele Guyton (KU Leuven) for her essay “‘A Certain Amount of Scientific Education’: Science, Sensation, and the Everyman Narrator in the Serialised War of the Worlds (1897).”

The committee noted, “This is a strong piece of work with a clearly focused and sustained argument that uses periodical studies to make an interesting contribution to readings of the novel and rethinks assumptions regarding class and readerly subjectivity.” The VanArsdel Prize is awarded annually to the best graduate student essay investigating Victorian periodicals and newspapers. The prize was established in 1990 to honor Rosemary VanArsdel, a founding member of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals whose groundbreaking research continues to shape the field of nineteenth-century periodical studies.

Stay Tuned to See These Articles in Print

Congratulations to the prize winners, who will each receive a $500 award and publication in an upcoming issue of Victorian Periodicals Review, and thank you to everyone who submitted an essay. We had a strong pool of submissions, and we especially want to thank this year’s judges, Carolyn Betensky and Flore Janssen, for their careful reading and generous feedback.

Congratulations to our 2024 Curran Fellowship Winners!

We are happy to announce nine RSVP Curran Fellows for 2024. The projects on which the Curran Fellows are working demonstrate the ongoing expansion and development of our fields of inquiry and objects of study. We very much look forward to hearing more about their work. Congratulations to:

  • Chandrika Kaul for Imperialism, Nationalism and Cultures of Print: Mahatma Gandhi & the Periodical Press,1880s-1914
  • Chieko Ichikawa for “Woman’s Corner” in The Co-operative
    News: Finding a Female Network to Care and Share
  • Clare Burnett for “Degradation and Ruin”: The Construction of
    Public Opinion About Cannabis in British and Australian Periodicals 1880-1901
  • James Mussell for Cast as Required: The Introduction of Hot-Metal Composition in the Late Nineteenth Century
  • Katherine Hobbs for Margaret Oliphant and the Woman Question in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine
  • Kristine Moruzi for Literary Cultures in Children’s Periodicals
  • Preeshita Biswas for Circulating Inter-Imperial News: Mapping Imperial Affinities and Resistance in British Periodicals in Meiji Japan, 1860 to 1900
  • Sarah Ghasedi for Sophia Jex-Blake’s Anonymous Journalism
    and the Battle for Female Doctors in Nineteenth-Century Britain
  • Wanda Ieremia-Allan for O le Lamepa o le Pasefika – The Pacific Lantern

Ongoing Support for Periodicals Research

The Curran Fellowships are a set of travel and research grants intended to aid scholars studying 19th-century British magazines and newspapers in making use of primary print and archival sources. Made possible through the generosity of the late Eileen Curran, Professor Emerita of English, Colby College, and inspired by her pioneering research on Victorian periodicals, the Fellowships are awarded annually.

Congratulations to Our 2023 Award Winners!

RSVP is pleased to announce the winners of our 2023 grants, fellowships, and prizes!

Our Sally Mitchell Dissertation Prize Winner

We are very happy to announce that the winner of our third-ever Sally Mitchell Dissertation Prize is Mila Daskalova for her dissertation, “Printing and Periodical Culture in the Nineteenth-Century Asylum”! The dissertation examines periodicals printed in mental asylums in the United States and Britain between 1836 and 1878, and was described by the adjudicating committee as “exemplifying periodical scholarship of the highest tier. […] It generates a rich new understanding of how such periodicals operated in the asylum context—as a means of therapy, self-expression, and community-building—and circulated beyond it.”

The Sally Mitchell Dissertation Prize is awarded annually to the best Ph.D. dissertation 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, not as a source of material for other historical topics. The prize was established to honor Sally Mitchell, a longstanding and highly valued member of RSVP’s leadership, and a committed and ardent mentor to graduate students.

Joint Winners for the Linda H. Peterson Fellowhip

Linda H. Peterson Fellowships support the study of any aspect of the periodical press in any of its manifold forms within and outside of the British Empire, where British magazines and newspapers were bought, sold, and read during the “long nineteenth century” (ca. 1780-1914). RSVP is delighted that there was an exceptionally high number of applicants this year, making for a very strong field. We congratulate our following joint winners for the 2023-24 year, each of whom will receive a fellowship:

  • Robert Burroughs, for his project, “S. J. Celestine Edwards, the ‘Black Champion’ of Victorian Oral and Print Culture.” The adjudicating committee noted that “This is a timely, deeply researched proposal…It spotlights the first Black editor of periodicals in Britain, while also pursuing interesting theoretical implications about oral, written, and print modalities; about Celestine Edwards’s cultural engagements; and about Black British experience then and now.”
  • Candace Ward, for her project, “The Caribbean Cosmopolis: Pan-Caribbean Identities and Nineteenth-Century Colonial Print Culture.” As the committee noted, “This proposal continues the urgent project of globalizing periodicals studies and complicating narratives about imperial relations, identity, and colonial archives with case studies from the Caribbean.”

Peterson Fellowships total $17,500 annually and are intended to support the researcher(s) awarded for a period equivalent to four full-time months. The Linda H. Peterson Fellowship was named after the widely influential Yale professor and longtime RSVP Board member and Vice President, and created with funds from a generous bequest to RSVP by the late Eileen Curran, pioneering researcher and Emerita Professor of English at Colby College.

RSVP’s Field Development Grant Winners Take on AI in Periodical Studies

This year’s RSVP Field Development Grant has been awarded to Thomas Smits (PI), with Paul Fyfe (North Carolina State University), Julia Thomas (Cardiff University), and Ben Lee (University of Washington Information School / Kluge Fellow Library of Congress) for their exciting project, “Multimodal AI, Image Analysis, and the Illustrated Periodical Press.”

The committee commented that “This is an outstanding proposal by four experienced scholars working at the forefront of machine learning methods for studying illustrations in the nineteenth-century press… It is exemplary in its collaborative and interdisciplinary approach it promises to undertake innovative scholarship that has a notable outward facing component.”

The RSVP Field Development Grant was created with funds from a generous bequest to RSVP by the late Eileen Curran, pioneering researcher and Emerita Professor of English at Colby College. The grant is intended to support an individual or a team of researchers in creating resources that will facilitate the work of other scholars in their studies of 19th-century British newspapers and periodicals.

Thanks to All Committee Members and Applicants

We very much look forward to seeing more of everyone’s wonderful research. We also offer our deepest thanks to all of the RSVP members and external experts who served on the adjudicating committees: it is a tremendous service to your community!

Congratulations to Our 2023 Curran Fellows

Above: George Cruikshank, “Our Library Table”, Ainsworth’s Magazine, 1842. Source: Granger Academic.

Our 2023 Curran Fellows have been chosen! RSVP received many strong proposals for this year’s Curran Fellowship competition. The Curran Fellowships are a set of travel and research grants intended to aid scholars studying 19th-century British magazines and newspapers in making use of primary print and archival sources.

Made possible through the generosity of the late Eileen Curran, Professor Emerita of English, Colby College, and inspired by her pioneering research on Victorian periodicals, the Fellowships are awarded annually.

Join us in congratulating the successful applications of:

  • Abigail Farrier, “A Pioneer Editress”: Frieda Cassin’s Complex Contributions to the 19th Century Caribbean Creole Literary World
  • Abigail Clayton, Marginal Voices, Miscellaneous Fragments: Black Journalism and the Transatlantic Editing of Abolition, 1850–1860
  • Courteney Smith, “Most earnest in their endeavours to abate this evil”: Newspapers, the Contagious Diseases Acts, and the Creation of Moral Identities in Britain
  • Ellen Smith, Letters to the Editor: Uncovering ‘Ladies’ in Imperial Newspapers in the 1857 Indian Rebellion and Beyond
  • Marzena Kubisz, “In the service of the helpless”: (R)evolutions of Vegetarian Periodicals for Children 1893-1914
  • Sarah Pedersen, British Newspaper Coverage of Nordic Women’s Suffrage Campaigners and Women Politicians 1870-1914
  • Simon Young, Newspaper Notes and Queries: Local Print Communities in Victorian Britain and Ireland
  • Stephan Pigeon, Sub-Editorial Wages and Precarity in Journalism

Congratulations to all!

2023 Colby Scholarly Book Prize Winner Announced

The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals is delighted to announce the Winner of the
2023 Robert and Vineta Colby Scholarly Book Prize, awarded annually to the book,
published in the preceding year that most advances our understanding of the nineteenth-
century press.

The Colby Book Prize was endowed in 2006 in memory of Robert Colby by his wife, Vineta
Colby, both distinguished scholars and long-time members of RSVP. In 2011, following Vineta’s
death, the Board of Directors of RSVP unanimously voted to re-name the prize to honor
both Robert and Vineta Colby for their many fine contributions to the study of Victorian
periodicals and their long commitment to RSVP.

Our 2023 Winner of the Colby Scholarly Book Prize

Jennie Batchelor, for The Lady’s Magazine (1770-1832) and the Making of Literary History (Edinburgh University Press, 2022). The committee described Batchelor’s book as ‘compelling’, ‘bold’, ‘exciting’, and highly impactful for the discipline. The study is focused entirely on recovering the historical and literary importance of a major but understudied title. It displays considerable archival work, is meticulously researched, and offers a sophisticated argument that also manages to be powerfully and entertainingly written. Batchelor’s The Lady’s Magazine is a model of an extended case study that also makes an intervention in literary studies, with a reach that links communities of writers and readers from the end of the eighteenth century to well into the nineteenth century.

Honourable Mentions

In addition, the committee selected Matthew Wale’s Making Entomologists: How Periodicals
Shaped Scientific Communities in Nineteenth-Century Britain (University of Pittsburgh Press,
2022) for Honourable Mention. The committee praised Wale’s thorough and substantial
study of natural history periodicals, pointing out the thoughtful way in which material is
organised around four entomological modes of discourse. Archival work informs the strong
narrative thread running through the book, and the whole greatly increases our
understanding of the role of periodicals in the popular representation of science in the
nineteenth century.

The committee also shortlisted Andrew King, ed., Work and the Nineteenth-Century Press:
Living Work for Living People (epub, Routledge, 2022) commending its broad and deep
importance for Victorian periodical studies, its innovative organisation, and its combination
of weighty original research with some ambitious conceptual models.

Congratulations to all!

Congratulations to Our 2022 VPR Prize Winners!

Having been officially announced at our annual conference, congratulations to our 2022 winners of our Victorian Periodicals Review awards, the Rosemary VanArsdel Prize and our first-ever Expanding the Field Prize!

VanArsdel Prize Winner

The winner of this year’s VanArsdel Prize is Alycia Gilbert (University of Washington) for her essay “‘Her Speech Betrayeth Her’: The New Woman and Gendered Slang in the Periodical Press.”

The committee notes, “This essay skillfully combines analysis through the lenses of gender studies and periodical studies with a linguistics-based approach. The author brings in a consideration of the intersections of class and gender as they shape the use of language. Periodicals are central to the study, which explores different genres (editorial, fiction, and reviews) and multiple titles.”

Expanding the Field Prize Winner

The first-ever VPR Expanding the Field Prize goes to Sourav Chatterjee (Columbia University) for his essay “Against Imitation: Anticolonial Caricatures in Basantak or the Bengali Punch.”

The committee writes: “This essay contributes to periodical studies in precisely the way this prize seeks to reward. The scope of research and scholarship is impressive, as the author’s argument and methodology decenter whiteness and advocate for a complex understanding of periodicals in India beyond the Anglocentric periodicals more commonly studied.”

Look for their essays in upcoming issues of Victorian Periodicals Review!