RSVP

The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals

Members News

Call for VPR Submissions Editors

“Printing-Office (The Victoria Press) in Great Coram-Street, for the Employment of Women as Compositors” from The Illustrated London News (Jun. 16, 1861). British Library, P.P. 7611

Victorian Periodicals Review (VPR) is expanding its editorial board to include Submissions Editors who will facilitate the double-blind peer review process. The journal invites expressions of interest from individuals working in nineteenth-century periodical studies who meet the criteria described below.

What’s Involved

Each Submissions Editor takes responsibility for securing specialist reviewers for approximately three submissions per year. On the basis of the reviewers’ reports, the Submissions Editor then provides a recommendation to the Editor. In the case of a recommendation for major revisions, the Submissions Editor’s opinion is usually sought on resubmission.

Submissions Editors will play a major role in shaping the journal and its critical interests in the years to come. Besides cultivating exciting new work in our field, Submissions Editors are encouraged to develop ideas for the journal’s occasional features, including Retrospectives, Review Conversations, and Round Tables. The VPR editorial team is unpaid and operates on a voluntary basis. Members of the editorial board serve for a three-year term with the option to renew.

Who Should Apply?

VPR is deliberately seeking to diversify its editorial board, and we encourage expressions of interest from scholars from a wide range of backgrounds, specializations, and career levels. We welcome applications evidencing one or more of the following:

  • Expertise in nineteenth-century periodicals or newspapers in any area or discipline. We are particularly looking to expand the board’s coverage of transatlantic, transnational, and transimperial print culture; the provincial press; working-class periodicals; comic and illustrated periodicals; race and ethnicity; and the long nineteenth century.
  • Editorial experience, such as working on a journal or digital project, editing special issues or collections of essays, or supervising MA/Ph.D. students.
  • A proven track record of collegiality and team contributions to the field through the activities of learned societies or conference organization.
  • Nineteenth-century subject expertise developed within organizations outside the university, such as libraries, museums, or galleries.

How to Apply

Interested candidates should send a one-page statement explaining their interest in the role and a one-page CV to VPR Editor Katherine Malone by Monday, January 9, 2023.

RSVP Seeks New Communications Coordinator

RSVP is now hiring a new Communications Coordinator! With many thanks and best wishes for our current coordinator, Alison Hedley, we find ourselves in search of someone to follow in her illustrious footsteps.

The RSVP Communications Coordinator administers communications related to awards, events, member news, and elections. Supervised by the President, the Communications Coordinator consults with the Vice-President and Treasurer as needed and collaborates with the Webmaster and Social Media Coordinator.

Help RSVP Thrive in This Paid Position

The work of the Communications Coordinator is estimated at 5 hours per week and paid at the rate of $20 USD per hour. The major duties of the Communications Coordinator include: 

  • Managing fellowship, grant, and prize applications and notifications in SM Apply in coordination with the awards committees and the President
  • Preparing the monthly newsletter: writing announcement copy, assembling  and editing submitted text and images, and distributing the newsletter by email using MailChimp
  • Assisting with digital event enrollment and administration as needed
  • Supporting communications related to the annual conference and elections
  • Responding to queries submitted to RSVP via the website contact form
  • Updating and maintaining the membership list 
  • Developing guidelines and other materials to support recurring and ongoing RSVP activities (for example, award committee decision-making)

Interested in Applying?

Applicants should send a cover letter indicating their interest in and qualifications for the position, along with a 1-2-page cv, to RSVP President Fionnuala Dillane by 10 October, 2022.

Congratulations to our 2022 Award Winners

The results are in for our Colby, Peterson and Field Development awards and grants!

Robert and Vineta Colby Book Prize

Book cover of Priti Joshi's Empire News. Includes title and stylized image of crumpled newsprintThe winner of this year’s Robert and Vineta Colby Book Prize is Priti Joshi’s Empire News: The Anglo-Indian Press Writes India (SUNY Press, 2021). The prize committee praised Empire News as “a valuable, innovative and timely study that brings to life the circulations of English language newspapers published in mid-century India with an immaculate level of care and attention to archival detail.” This book “compellingly illuminates the ways in which the empire was not a monolithic construct of the press, but an often contradictory space of competing voices, shaped by the journalistic need for copy, access to sources, and volatility in the business of press production.”

The committee would also like to give an honourable mention to Alison Moulds’ Medical Identities and Print Culture, 1830s-1910s (Palgrave, 2021) as a highly impressive work of scholarship for an early career researcher.

Linda H. Peterson Prize

Laura Vorachek is this year’s recipient of the Linda H. Peterson Prize for her project, The Society of Women Journalists, 1894-1914. As the decision committee commented that with its “impressive” temporal and international scope, this project “promises to add significantly to our knowledge and understanding of the role of women journalists and the press from the late nineteenth century to the beginning of World War One.”

RSVP Field Development Grant

This year, the Field Development Grant committee has made the somewhat unusual decision to divide the award equally between two equally worthy and complementary projects: Printed Matters: Early Representations of the Caribbean in British Periodicals (Louise Kane) and Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition: Investigating an Archival Future (James Mussell, Mark Turner, and Paul Caton).

Collecting articles from British periodicals that represent the Caribbean, Printed Matters will “expand and expedite” new research possibilities in the field. Scholars of British imperialism, transatlanticism, Caribbeanism, and more will benefit immensely from this exciting project.

Investigating an Archival Future, meanwhile, will be invaluable as “a clear model for how to wind down digital projects while preserving their usability.” While it focuses on preserving and archiving an existing resource, the Nineteenth Century Serials Edition (ncse), it will nonetheless develop the field of periodical studies in a crucial way.

Congratulations to all! Thanks to those who submitted and to our awards committees for all their hard work. Stay tuned for further announcements regarding our Sally Mitchell Dissertation, VanArsdel and Expanding the Field prizes, which will be made later this summer.

Congratulations to our 2022 Curran Fellowship Winners!

In case you missed it in our last (March) newsletter, we’re pleased to announce this year’s Eileen M. Curran Fellowship winners!

These travel and research grants are intended to aid scholars of 19th-century British periodicals who wish to study primary print and archival sources. These fellowships are made possible by a generous bequest of the late Eileen Curran, Professor Emerita of English at Colby College and inspired by her pioneering research on Victorian periodicals.

Our 2022 fellows are:

  • Sue Chen, “Preparing the Child for Science”: Victorian Children’s Periodicals and Scientific Literacy
  • Richard Scully, The Last Victorian: Sir Bernard Partridge, Pictures, Periodicals, and Politics in Britain, 1861-1945
  • Catherine Birch, Female Punch Contributors, 1868-1918
  • Stéphane Sadoux, The Cheap Cottages Crusade: Rural Bylaws and the Periodical Press, 1901-1905
  • Tsz Ting Yan, China, Humour, and the Opium Wars in Punch: An Intertextual Enquiry
  • Julie Sorge Way, Inviting Submission: Isabella Beeton’s Journalism and Editorial Work at the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, 1857-1865
  • Beth Rodgers, L.T. Meade and the Professionalisation of Authorship at the Fin de Siècle

Congratulations again to our winners! We look forward to the fruits of your archival work.

Already thinking about next year’s fellowships? Learn more about our annual fellowships, grants, and prizes on our website.

Help Us Improve the Curran Index

Using the Curran Index: Experiences, Search, and Improvements (Focus Group)

17 March 2022 from 6-7:30pm (GMT) /2-3:30pm (EDT)

Dr. Lara Atkin and Dr. Emily Bell, editors of the Curran Index, invite Victorianist researchers and teachers to attend this focus group to feed directly into planned changes to the search and navigation of the Index. The Curran Index is a treasure trove of information about who was writing the articles, reviews, stories, novels, and poems of the Victorian periodical press. This is an opportunity to discuss your experience and issues using the existing Index interface, and provide feedback on what would be most useful to you as a researcher moving forward.

Register to attend the focus group here. Registration is free and open to all.

We’d Like Your Input on Improving the Curran Index

The Curran Index features over 168,000 contributions to influential 19th-century British weeklies, monthlies, quarterlies, and annuals. The current website was launched in 2017, and we are about to undertake some exciting work to improve the speed, layout and search function of the Index. We invite any Victorianist teacher or researcher, at any career stage, inside or outside of the academy, to come along and share their views.

In this session, we will show the current Curran Index interface and outline the proposed changes. Then, we will open up discussion around the following points:

  1. Have you used the Curran Index in your research? If so, what for (e.g. was it to look up a specific author, or periodical, or article)? If not, why not?
  2. How easy or difficult do you find it to navigate around the website? Please give a rating on a scale of 1-5 (where 1 is easy and 5 is difficult) and explain your answer.
  3. How easy was it to find the information you were looking for? Which facets did you use to narrow your search?
  4. What kind of information would you expect to see on the homepage? What are the most important search filters for your research?
  5. Would a Curran Index blog with research case studies of how the index has been used by other researchers be useful to you?
  6. What other information would you expect to find on the website?
  7. What additional features would be useful?

Have Ideas But Can’t Attend the Focus Group?

If you are unable to attend the event on 17 March but would like to pass on your thoughts on the questions above, or indeed anything to do with the Index more generally, we’d be very pleased to hear from you. Please email the editors directly with any feedback you might have. Thank you for your thoughts!

Half-Day Workshop on Multilingualism and Periodical Studies

The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals in conjunction with the European Society for Periodical Research is excited to announce

Multilingualism and Periodical Studies
A Half-day Virtual Workshop

31 March 2022
3pm-6pm (BST/CET)

This two-part online workshop brings together scholars and researchers on the topic of
multilingualism in periodicals scholarship. It seeks to spotlight ongoing projects in academic
research across languages, as well as to ask questions about the challenges and possibilities that pertain to multilingual approaches.

Because of their generic hybridity and varying circulations, periodicals have always invited interdisciplinary methods, which our participants expand into the study of periodicals’ linguistic richness. Periodicals define far more intricate political imaginaries and publics than just the nation. Their linguistic complexity and language circulation work within as well as across political formations at various scales. And the geographic and generic reach of periodicals calls for scholars to research them with just as capacious an approach.

“Multilingualism and Periodicals Studies” brings together representatives from multiple
disciplines and international arenas. The half-day workshop includes two 90-minute virtual
sessions. It begins with a session of research presentations about active projects in the field,
followed by a roundtable discussion among participating scholars and our audience. The
workshop is jointly hosted by the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP) and the
European Society for Periodical Research (ESPRit).

The event is free and open to anyone interested in attending either one or both sessions. Membership in RSVP and ESPRit is not required, though advance registration is needed. Register for the event here.

Confirmed Speakers

Research Presentations

Roundtable