RSVP

The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals

Conference News

Dr. Paul Fyfe wins Prestigious Donald Gray Prize

Congratulations to RSVP member Dr. Paul Fyfe winner of this year’s Donald Gray Prize for the best essay published in the field of Victorian studies.

Dr. Fyfe’s article ‘An Archaeology of Victorian Newspapers‘ was published in the Winter 2016 edition of Victorian Periodicals Review.

The NAVSA judging committee – Deborah Denenholz Morse (Chair), Mary Jean Corbett, Martin Danahay, and Peter Hoffenberg  – commented:

Paul Fyfe’s ‘An Archaeology of Victorian Newspapers’ excavates a portion of “the largely hidden history of how Victorian data gets to now” by filling in some of the gaps between then and now.  This fascinating essay, which draws on the methods of book history and media archaeology, as well as practicing a form of “investigative scholarly journalism,” explores the occluded material histories of one large-scale digitization project: the British Library’s massive collection of nineteenth-century newspapers.  He establishes its complex relations to a range of mid-twentieth-century agents, technologies, and institutions, from the preservation efforts undertaken in the aftermath of the second world war to the emergence of (and continuing role played by) microfilm in the collaboration between libraries, micropublishers, and the forerunners of the CIA. Victorian media became digital, Fyfe argues, both by subordinating the provinces to the metropole and by having the techno-labor of its production outsourced to India and Cambodia. In a timely investigation of what now constitute “the enabling conditions of our scholarship,” the essay charts a path forward for thinking about—and critically reflecting on—the digital tools we all use.

 

Registration open: Editing the 20th Century – 5th September, British Library, London

Registration is now open for ‘Editing the 20th Century’

As part of the British Academy funded project, ‘Editing the Twentieth Century’, a one-day conference will take place at the British Library on 5 September 2017 exploring the key role played by the editors of periodical publications throughout the long twentieth century.

Registration is open here.

A PDF of the programme is also available here: Editingthe20thCenturyConferenceProgramme.

Tuesday 5th September 2017, 9.00am-6.45pm. The British Library, 96 Euston Road, London, NW1 2DB.

Call for papers: Magazines on the Move – North American Periodicals and Travel

Call for papers: Magazines on the Move: North American Periodicals and Travel

A one-day seminar hosted by the Centre for Travel Writing Studies, Nottingham Trent University, in collaboration with the Network for American Periodical Studies.

Friday 22nd September 2017, Nottingham Trent University, Clifton Campus

Keynote speaker: Professor Andrew Thacker (Nottingham Trent University)

Organisers: Dr Victoria Bazin (Northumbria University); Dr Rebecca Butler (Nottingham Trent University); Dr Sue Currell (Sussex University); Prof Tim Youngs (Nottingham Trent University).

Confirmed speakers include Dr Claire Lindsay (UCL) and Dr Rachel Farebrother (Swansea University).

This day-seminar will focus on the relationship between North American travel writing and the periodical format. Its primary purpose is to facilitate historical and critical discussion of narratives of travel in North American periodicals.

Nottingham Trent invite proposals for twenty-minute papers that examine accounts of travel to, within, or from North America, published in North American periodicals. They also welcome papers on periodicals and travel of Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean.

Topics to be examined in considering the interplay between the travel experience, the written and/or visual record of travel, and the periodical publication of the travel record, may include, but are not limited to:

  • Commercial considerations
  • Editorial policy and interventions
  • Gender and sexuality
  • Periodical context and design
  • Purpose of travel
  • ‘Race’
  • Readership
  • Solo or group travel
  • Technologies of transport/mode of travel
  • Tourism
  • Visual representations

The seminar is a collaboration between Nottingham Trent’s Centre for Travel Writing Studies (CTWS) and the Network of American Periodical Studies (NAPS). It draws on the expertise of both research centres, as well as that of our keynote speaker, Professor Andrew Thacker (NTU), a specialist in modernist magazines and spatial geographies of modernism.

The Centre for Travel Writing Studies (CTWS) was established by Prof Tim Youngs (Nottingham Trent University) in 2002 to produce, facilitate, and promote scholarly research on travel writing and its contexts, without restriction of period, locus, or type of travel writing.

The Network of American Periodical Studies (NAPS) is a research initiative set up by Dr Sue Currell (Sussex University) and Dr Victoria Bazin (Northumbria University). It aims to bring together scholars working on American periodicals (magazines, newspapers and other periodical publications) from a range of historical periods and disciplines.

Papers are welcomed from scholars at any career stage. Postgraduates are strongly encourage to submit a proposal for consideration. Paper proposals of c200 words should be sent to ctws@ntu.ac.uk by 28th July 2017. Early submission is advised.
With grateful thanks to the British Association for American Studies (BAAS) for financial support a limited number of travel bursaries and fee waivers for postgraduate students to attend are offered. Priority will be given to those offering papers. Please state at the end of your proposal if you are a postgraduate wishing to apply for help towards costs.

Call for Papers: Editing the Twentieth Century

Members of the RSVP community may be interested in the following CFP:

‘Editing the Twentieth Century’, The British Library. 5 September 2017

Call for Papers: What do editors actually do? What makes a good editor? And more importantly, what makes a successful editor? From the Times Literary Supplement to Les Temps Modernes and Novyi Mir, from The Criterion to Die neue Rundschau and Spare Rib, there can be no doubting the influence of literary-intellectual magazines in selecting and shaping our cultural knowledge, our beliefs and values. But we still know surprisingly little about how these crucial cultural institutions were led and managed and even how day-to-day editorial duties were undertaken in practice. Above all, we lack any kind of comparative perspective on the role of the periodical editor, both across national and historical boundaries and across different types of publications. How does the role of editor compare between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, for example, or between the French and British intellectual fields? How does it vary across literary reviews, newspapers, academic journals and commercial magazines? And in all these cases, how can we reconcile the reality of editorial practice – so often mundane and resolutely collective –with the stubbornly persistent myth of the singular charismatic editor?

As part of the British Academy funded project, Editing the Twentieth Century, we invite papers and workshop contributions addressing these issues for a one-day event to be held at the British Library on 5 September 2017 exploring the key role played by the editors of periodical publications throughout the long twentieth century. As well as specific studies of individual editors and publications, we particularly welcome comparative analyses (both chronological and geographical), theoretical approaches, and reflections from practitioners. Contributors may choose to address one or more of the following issues:

  • Editorial success and failure
  • Editorial responsibilities, competences and dispositions
  • Editorial foundations, programmes, and manifestos
  • Editorial succession
  • Editorial leadership and administration
  • Editorial creativity and sociability
  • Editorship as authorship
  • Collective and uncredited editorship
  • Comparative studies across periodical genres, national contexts, and historical periods

Proposals of around 250 words for 20-minute papers should be sent to editors.bl.17@gmail.com by 15 March 2017. We also welcome proposals for joint panels of three or four related papers or other forms of presentation and discussion.

RSVP Annual Conference CFP Extended: 15th Feb

The call for papers for our next conference Borders and Border Crossings is still open and the website can be found here. The conference will take place at

Freiburgfreiburg University, Germany, 27th – 29th July 2017.

RSVP is an interdisciplinary and international organization welcoming all scholars interested in the richly diverse world of the 19th-century British press. Please send a proposal (250 words maximum) and a short CV (no more than 200 words) to rs4vp2017@gmail.com by 15th February 2017. Individual presentations should be fifteen to twenty minutes, and proposals for panels of three are welcome. Please include a brief rationale for the panel along with an abstract and CV for each presenter.

Call for Papers: RSVP annual Conference ‘Borders and Border Crossings’

We are delighted to announce that the call for papers is now open for our next conference Borders and Border Crossings. The conference will take place at Freiburg University, Germany, 27th – 29th July 2017.

Below are some pictures of the ‘Jewel of the Black Forest’ as Freiburg is sometimes known!

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Photographs courtesy of Sandra Meyndt, Joachim Hirschfeld, Baschi Bender.