Awards News

RSVP is very pleased to announce the first winners of the RSVP Field Development Grant and the Linda H. Peterson Fellowship, both made possible by a generous bequest to RSVP by the late Eileen Curran, pioneering researcher and Emerita Professor of English at Colby College.

The winners of the Field Development Grant are Francesca Benatti and David King of The Open University for their project, “A question of style: individual voices and corporate identity in the Edinburgh Review, 1814-20”.

The winner of the Linda H. Peterson Fellowship is Tom Mole, Reader in English Literature and Director of the Centre for the History of the Book at the University of Edinburgh, for his project: “Periodicals and the Policing of Culture, 1802-1828”.

See the abstracts of these projects and learn more about these grants in Grants and Prizes on the RSVP website.

The Colby Prize committee of RSVP is pleased to announce that the winner of the prize for the best book in this field published in 2015 is Mary L. Shannon for Dickens, Reynolds, and Mayhew on Wellington Street: The Print Culture of a Victorian Street, from Routledge. Honorable Mention goes to Marianne VanRemoortel for Women, Work, and the Victorian Periodical: Living by the Press, from Palgrave/Macmillan. Many congratulations to Mary and Marianne!

The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals is delighted to announce the winner of the 2014 Robert and Vineta Colby Scholarly Book Prize – Caroline Bressey, author of Empire, Race, and the Politics of Anti-Caste (Bloomsbury, 2014). The Colby Prize is awarded to the scholarly book that most advances the understanding of the nineteenth-century British newspaper or periodical press. The selection committee praised Caroline Bressey’s book as innovative and conceptually engaging, citing its challenge to metropolitan-centric modelings of transnational and trans-Atlantic traffic in ideas, people, and publications and its careful contextualization of a pair of periodical case-studies. In engaging prose, the beautifully illustrated book makes original and powerful use of two micro-histories to address a big-picture issue – 19^th c. antiracial activism in and beyond Britain and the US. Noting the multiple ways that ideas of geography shape the structure and inform the discourse of the book, the committee singled out its attention not only to periodical communities but also to the social networks supporting these periodical communities.

The committee awarded an “honorable mention” this year to Martin Hewitt, author of The Dawn of the Cheap Press in Victorian Britain: The End of the ‘Taxes on Knowledge,’ 1849-1869. The committee praised Hewett’s wonderfully researched study for its meticulous documentation of “the changes and challenges wrought by the legacy of repeal” of taxes on knowledge in the mid century.

The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP) is pleased to announce the fifth annual Gale Dissertation Research Fellowship, made possible by the generosity of publisher Gale, part of Cengage Learning, in support of dissertation research that makes substantial use of full-text digitized collections of 19th-century British magazines and newspapers. A prize of $1500 will be awarded, together with one year’s passworded subscription to selected digital collections from Gale, including 19th Century UK Periodicals and 19th Century British Library Newspapers.

Please see our Awards page for further information.