RSVP

The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals

Conference News

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.

Your How-To Guide to Our 2021 Virtual Conference

How-To Guide Contents:
Registration
Viewing presentations
Zoom links
Session format
Chairing instructions
Zoom tech assistance instructions

 

How does this virtual conference work?

The conference will hold virtual sessions via Zoom, from 8-11 September, at the times indicated on the conference schedule. Attendees can view, listen to, and read presenter materials in advance of the regular sessions on the conference website. The regular sessions themselves will be primarily devoted to discussion among presenters and attendees. Keynote talks will also take place over Zoom, but there are no advance materials for these events.

The Zoom link for each session is posted to the password-protected page for that session on the conference website (see below for more information). There is no need to register for individual sessions ahead of time.

Please review the schedule as posted on the conference website to plan your participation, as some changes have been made in recent weeks.

How do I register for the conference?

Select the Registration tab of the conference website; simply enter your name and email address and hit submit. You will receive an automated email notification that includes the password to access all password-protected areas of the website. Please note that this message will not include the links to the Zoom sessions. See the next question for information about Zoom session links.

Where can I view the schedule
and the presentation materials themselves?

Visit the tab for each day of the conference (Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4) for the daily schedule of presentations. Click on the title of a panel to be taken to the presentations (videos, podcasts, papers) themselves. Registrants will be prompted to enter a password. This password will have been sent to you automatically upon registration. If you have not received it or cannot find it, please contact RSVP’s Communications Coordinator, Alison Hedley.

Please view, listen to, and read presenter materials in advance of the session; presenters will not be giving full papers during the session, but will give a brief overview followed by Q&A discussion.

The link the Zoom room for each panel or event appears at the top of the password-protected page for this panel. Please note that there are different rooms/Zoom links for every event. When you click on the Zoom link at the beginning of the event, you will be directed to a Zoom waiting room; one of the session hosts (the chair or the tech assistant) will let you into the meeting.

We recommend having the most recent version of Zoom downloaded on your computer to limit technical hiccups.

For information on Zoom use and troubleshooting, please see Zoom’s video tutorials; to quickly find the answer to a specific question, use the search function of the Zoom Help Center.

What is the format of regular sessions?

Please review the schedule as posted on the conference website in case any changes have been made to a panel.

The sessions themselves are structured to facilitate engaging discussion. To listen to the full version of each paper, participants can access presenters’ materials in advance on the conference website (see above). Sessions will take the following format:

– The chair will introduce the speakers, their bios, and conference presentation titles
– Speakers will give a recap of their presentation in 5 minutes or less
– The chair will then open the floor to Q&A from audience members
– The panel will be 60 minutes in total

How do I chair the panel I’ve volunteered for?

Thank you for agreeing to chair a panel! Please be sure to read/view/listen to the presentations in your session in advance. If you have not already done so, email your session panelists to solicit brief biographical statements. You should have received an email from RSVP’s Communications Coordinator with information about how to contact panelists; please refer to this email or contact Alison Hedley.

Please review the schedule as posted on the conference website in case any changes have been made to your panel.  Plan to arrive at your session 15 minutes early so that one of the conference’s local organizers can make you a co-host of the Zoom room. This will give you essential administrative privileges, such as the abilities to enable screen sharing and adjust room settings if/as needed. Please see above for the format of regular sessions. Your role involves introducing panelists and sharing or reading their bios; moderating discussion, and keeping the session to time.

OPTIONAL: If you wish, you can copy and paste panelist bios into Zoom’s chat function rather than reading each statement aloud prior to each paper brief. If the session has many presenters, this option has the benefit of opening a bit more time for discussion. If your panel chooses this option, please let attendees know to look for presenter bios in the Zoom chat window.

Wherever possible, another RSVP member has volunteered to serve as a tech assistant/backup in your session in case of any problems with Zoom. Their duties are listed below. If you do not have tech backup and you run into Zoom tech issues: you may find your solution on the Zoom Help Center; otherwise, send a text message to +1 215-629-6773, clearly stating the session for which you require support.

How do I offer the Zoom assistance I have signed up for?

Thank you for offering Zoom assistance for a session! Please arrive 5-10 minutes early for the session so that a local organizer or the panel chair can make you a co-host.

Your role involves the following tasks:

– managing attendee questions that are posed in the chat function (jumping into discussion if/when appropriate to articulate these questions)
– adding any appropriate links in the session chat as needed (such as the link to the session webpage on the conference website)
– taking over for the chair if their wifi cuts out;
– any other tech troubleshooting you might be able to offer if needed (perhaps with assistance from the Zoom Help Center). For any major technical difficulties, please send a text message to +1 215-629-6773, clearly stating the session for which you require support.

Our Conference Registration is Now Open!

We’re thrilled to announce that registration for our 2021 virtual conference, “Revolution(s), Evolution(s), Circulation(s)” is now open! Registration is free for all attendees, though all presenters must be members of RSVP. Register for the conference on our conference website.

Once registered, participants should receive an email with the password to access all pre-recorded presentations on the conference website. If you do not receive an email or you did not receive a password because you pre-registered, please contact our conference hosts, Douglas Greenfield and Anna Peak, who will be happy to assist you.

How To Access Presentations

For each day (Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4) of the conference, hover over the name of the panel, and click through to view the content. The conference includes a variety of formats, including written papers, audio recordings, and pre-recorded videos/slideshows. The conference schedule indicates what presentation modality each session will follow.

Please note that the website is still a work-in-progress as we receive late submissions. Also please note that, similar to previous years, sessions are subject to change.

How to Help Out

We still need a few volunteers to chair individual sessions. You can review the line-up and sign yourself up for a panel on this Google sign-up sheet. Thank you to everyone who has already volunteered!

How The Conference Will Proceed

The conference will hold virtual sessions via Zoom from 8-11 September at the times indicated on the conference schedule. Zoom links will be posted to each session’s individual web page as they become available. There is no need to “register” for individual sessions ahead of time.

The sessions themselves will focus on highly engaged discussion. Participants should access presenters’ materials in advance of the actual conference dates. Sessions will take the following format:

  • The chair will introduce the speakers, their bios, and conference presentation title
  • Speakers will give a 5-minute recap of their presentation
  • The chair will then open the floor to Q&A from audience members
  • The panel will be 60 minutes in total

We look forward to seeing you at this, our first-ever virtual conference!

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.

CFP: RSVP Annual Conference 2021

“Revolution(s), Evolution(s), Circulation(s)”

September 7-12, 2021

An Online Conference hosted by

Temple University
Philadelphia, PA, USA

 

Our 2021 conference details have been finalized and we issue this formal Call for Papers for the Annual Conference of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals!

Importantly, all proposals accepted for the postponed 2020 conference remain approved. We invite additional proposals for papers or panels of three or four related papers that address any aspect of the Victorian periodical or newspaper press. Proposals relevant to the conference theme of Revolution(s), Evolution(s), Circulation(s) are particularly welcome.

Topics that might be considered include, but are not limited to:

  • Coverage of revolutions and revolutionary thought in the periodical press
  • Censorship, restriction, and control of the press
  • Revolutions and evolutions in periodical production, design, illustration, editorship, readership
  • Darwin’s Theory of Evolution or other revolutionary scientific and medical theories
  • Upheavals in class, gender, race
  • The New Journalism
  • Circulation of periodicals
  • Dissemination of ideas: plagiarism, copy, imitation
  • Circulating bodies (emigration/immigration, the slave trade)
  • Circulatory systems (pollution, disease, blood)
  • The growth or evolution of specialized periodicals
  • Fashion and fads
  • Revolutions and evolutions in work and entertainment
  • Revolutions and evolutions in periodicals studies, research methodologies, and teaching periodicals
  • Digital (r)evolutions and the press

Proposals for 15-minute papers or panels should be submitted by March 1 via the RSVP application portal. Applicants will complete a short information form and upload the following documents to the portal:

  • Proposal for papers
    • A 250-word abstract with a title
    • A separate 75-word biographical statement
  • Panel proposals:
    • A set of three or four 250-word abstracts with titles
    • A general title for the session
    • A 75-word biographical statement for each participant

How Will the Conference Work?

Papers will be circulated in advance of live panel discussions. We are hoping to accommodate a variety of formats including written papers, audio recordings, and videos. We will confirm the format with new and previously accepted presenters.

How Much Will the Conference Cost?

All those giving a paper at the RSVP conference are required to be members of the Society, but conference registration will be free.

Information on joining the Society can be found on our website, as can additional information about RSVP; its scholarly journal, Victorian Periodicals Review; its annual grants and awards; and its many other activities. Contact us if you have further questions.

We Want Your Input on Future Digital Events!

Tell Us What You Think

In addition to the RSVP Digital Salon, we’d like to gauge RSVP members’ interest in attending any other virtual event(s) this upcoming academic year (Fall 2020-Spring 2021). To that end, we’ve created a brief survey to collect your thoughts. Your input will drive our efforts to help us stay connected during this time, so thank you in advance!

Please take a moment to fill out the survey here: https://forms.gle/ECRfYZKSWTaAi4fh8. It shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes or so of your time to fill out.