RSVP

The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals

Members News

Victorian Women Writers conference in honor of Linda Peterson, May 7-8, Yale University

All are invited to attend a memorial conference in honor of Linda Peterson, on May 7-8, 2016, in celebration of her final publication, The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women’s Writing, to be hosted by the 18-19th Century Colloquium.

A member of the Yale community for 38 years, Linda was a scholar of Victorian prose and an authority on life writing; she served as English chair for seven years, helped shape Yale’s undergraduate writing program, and profoundly enhanced the scope and tenor of the Yale English Department. She was a scholar, teacher, colleague, and friend. Please save May 7-8 for an opportunity to fête Linda in a context that reflects her wishes, honors her legacy, and lauds the publication of her final book!

Please contact Margaret Deli (margaret.deli@yale.edu) or Natalie Prizel (natalie.prizel@yale.edu) to register (free of charge.) Attached is the conference poster

RSVP ANNUAL CONFERENCE CFP 2016 – UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI-KANSAS CITY

BIGGER, Better, More! — Growth and Expansion in the Victorian Press
University of Missouri-Kansas City, September 9–10, 2016

The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals invites proposals for its 2016 conference on the theme of growth and expansion in the Victorian press. We encourage broad interpretation of what “Bigger, Better, More!” means for Victorian newspapers and magazines, with possible topics including:

• Proliferation of news events, headline stories, scandals
• Serialization, sequels, symposia, rejoinders,
recurring columns
• Developments in printing technology, formats,
editorial vision
• Increased readership, population, urban and imperial
expansion
• Economic growth, profits, investments, windfalls,
boom-and-bust cycles
• Excess, hyperbole, filler
• Malignant growth, plagues, floods, parasites
• Natural growth, plants, parks, green spaces
• Education, maturation, age, experience, longevity
• Emerging taxonomies, catalogs, indexes, censuses
• Developing networks, movements, professional and
amateur organizations, bureaucracies
• Growth of periodical studies, methodologies, pedagogies, archives

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 one-page CV to rs4vp2016@gmail.com by February 1, 2016. Individual presentations should be fifteen to twenty minutes, and proposals for panels of three are welcome; be sure to include a brief rationale for the panel along with an abstract and CV for each presenter. A limited number of travel grants will be awarded to graduate students and independent scholars; please indicate in your email if you would like to be considered for one of these grants.

We are pleased to announce that the eighteenth annual Michael Wolff Lecture will be given by James Mussell, Associate Professor of Victorian Literature at the University of Leeds and author of Science, Time and Space in the Late Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press (2007) and The Nineteenth-Century Press in the Digital Age (2012)

The RSVP conference also features the Robert and Vineta Colby Lecture, given by the winner of the Colby Prize for the year’s best book on the Victorian press. This year’s recipient will be announced in spring 2016.

For more information, please visit the conference website: rsvp2016-kc.com.
Find RSVP on the web at rs4vp.org and follow us on Twitter @RS4VP, #RSVP2016.

PhD Studentships – Professions and the Press

If any colleagues have outstanding students about to complete their MA or BA and who might be interested in doing a PhD on any aspect of professions and the press (except medical) in the long nineteenth century, they should consider applying to the University of Greenwich, UK

http://www2.gre.ac.uk/research/study/studentships.

Prospective candidates are also welcome to contact the Director of Studies informally:

Professor Andrew King:  a.king@gre.ac.uk.

In Memoriam: Linda Peterson

Linda H. Peterson, born on October 11, 1948, died peacefully June 25, 2015, on the campus of Yale University, where she was a professor and former chair in the Department of English.  Until days before her death, which ended a multi-year battle against cancer, few friends knew the seriousness of her illness, for she had decided that she wished to focus on the pleasures of her work as an active scholar, finishing her latest book, and as a contributor to university life, which she was, during her 38 years on the faculty.  Her books include Victorian Autobiography (1986), Traditions of Victorian Women’s Autobiography (1999) and Becoming a Woman of Letters (2009). Her work also enriched the teaching of writing nationwide, through her role as general editor of The Norton Reader in five editions published from 1996 through the current edition and in her role as past president of the National Council of Writing Program Administrators.

She will be greatly missed by many colleagues and students; by her mother, Martha Haenlein Boese; by her three younger sisters, Deborah Haenlein Kile, Carla Haenlein Piazza, and Kristy Haenlein Taylor; and by her husband, Fred Strebeigh, her colleague at Yale since 1979.  At her request, there will be no funeral.  Colleagues are creating a fund, in her honor, to support travel by graduate students to conduct research and attend conferences.  A memorial celebrating the publication of her new book, the Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women’s Writing, of which she is editor, with contributions from 17 scholars from around the world, will take place near the book’s publication in late 2015.