RSVP

The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals

Members News

CFP: RSVP Special Session for MLA 2023

The Research Society of Victorian Periodicals seeks proposals for a Special Session at the
January 5-8, 2023 MLA convention in San Francisco, in keeping with the presidential theme of
“Working Conditions” (News from the MLA 2023 Presidential Theme: Working Conditions).

We welcome abstracts of 250-400 words on all aspects of work and working conditions within
and represented by the nineteenth-century press. We particularly welcome proposals oriented
toward social justice issues that cross geographic (including oceanic) borders and that offer
intersectional approaches to race, class, and gender.

Topics might include:

  • Hierarchies of working conditions in periodical production and distribution
  • Outsourcing of press labor
  • Reforms of working conditions and their national and international press coverage
  • Periodical representations of enslaved and oppressed laborers, including colonial workers
  • New archival sources for investigating working conditions demanded by periodical production
  • Periodical representations of work conditions for educators (a special focus of the 2023
    Presidential Theme) in day schools, boarding schools, universities, and those emerging after the 1870 Education Act
  • Sensational exposés of working conditions as sensation journalism and/or reformist interventions
  • Press coverage of Parliamentary debates about working conditions
  • Royal Commission investigations of working conditions in periodical reports and editorials, and
    their inspiration in fiction and poetry
  • New approaches to Henry Mayhew’s documentation of workers and working conditions in
    newspaper, periodical, and book form
  • Working-class periodicals and workers
  • The use of sentimentality, empathy, and rage in press coverage of working conditions
  • Global and local working conditions in the digitizing of nineteenth-century periodicals

Please send proposals and a short bio or 1-page c.v. to Linda K. Hughes by 10 March 2022.

CFP: Four Nations & Beyond – Periodical Studies and National Identities in the British Isles and Ireland

The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP) and the Scottish Centre for Victorian and Neo-Victorian Studies (SCVS) presents

Four Nations and Beyond:

Periodical Studies and National Identities in the British Isles and Ireland

Trades Hall, Glasgow
20 May 2022

This one-day workshop will explore how Victorian periodical and newspaper cultures operated in the different nations of the British Isles and Ireland, and in their diaspora cultures that emerged through emigration and imperialism. We hope to interrogate how periodicals constructed Irish, Scottish and Welsh identities, in relation to or in opposition to a range of ‘English’ identities, as well as examining how such English identities were unmade and remade in coeval relation with the neighbouring countries it governed. We welcome papers that investigate whether and how distinctive periodical cultures emerged in Ireland, Scotland and Wales, or in relation to English sites outside London and its environs. Were there distinct English regional identities centred on, for instance, Cornwall, Yorkshire, or the England-Wales or England-Scotland border areas?

Our inclusion of ‘beyond’ in the title speaks to ongoing interest in periodicals and newspapers in settler cultures and diasporic communities: how were these identities constructed outside Britain and Ireland in relation to indigenous cultures and other immigrant cultures? We ask too how transimperial dynamics put pressure on the ways in which globally circulating English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh periodicals articulate conceptions of the nation that ‘seem to cohere along a continuum that fuses a geoethnically bound sense of place with time’ (Sukanya Banerjee).

We are especially interested in exploring the still underexamined aspects of linguistic distinctiveness and papers centred on Welsh, Irish, Scots, Gaelic, Ulster-Scots, Manx or English regional dialects are encouraged. Proposals that focus on an individual publication, or that reflect on periodical or newspaper culture more broadly—including reflecting on the usefulness or otherwise of the ‘four nations’ as a concept and frame within Victorian periodical studies as we continue to widen our understanding of what we mean by ‘Victorian’—are also welcome.

A One-Day Conference in Glasgow

We anticipate that this workshop will take place in person in the Trades Hall in Glasgow city centre, conforming to guidelines and best practice in relation to social distancing and other regulations. We will provide opportunities to participate remotely, and will make linked content available online. Please signal in your submission if you would not be able to attend in person.

Registration for the workshop is funded by the SCVS at the University of Strathclyde and will be free up to a maximum of 30 participants.

Travel Bursaries Available

RSVP will award five travel bursaries of £200 for PG/ECR/Independent Scholar participants who do not have other access to institutional funding. If you would like to apply for these bursaries, please state so in your submission.

Proposals Now Accepted Through 18 March 2022

Proposals should be emailed to 4nationsandbeyond@gmail.com and should consist of a 250 word abstract and a 5-line biography. The deadline for proposals is Friday, 18 March 2022. Participants will be notified shortly thereafter.

We encourage advance submission of your presentation as a recorded presentation (max. 15 minutes) or draft paper (max. 2,500 words) so it can be shared with registered participants who are not attending in person (should there be any issues on the day with online streaming). Pre-submissions should be received by 6 May 2022.

Kirstie Blair, University of Strathclyde

Fionnuala Dillane, on behalf of RSVP

Announcing a New Annual VPR Prize!

RSVP is excited to announce a new annual prize! The Victorian Periodicals Review Expanding the Field Prize will be awarded annually for an outstanding essay that diversifies the existing geographic, racial, and ethnic composition of nineteenth-century periodical studies. We encourage submissions that deepen our understanding of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) founders, editors, contributors, and readers of periodicals; interrogate Anglocentric perspectives; enact anti-racist or anti-colonial values; and/or consider the cultural impact of the British Empire around the world.

The awardee will receive $500 and publication of their article in Victorian Periodicals Review. Graduate students, independent scholars, and faculty of all ranks are invited to submit their work.

Applications for our inaugural prize winner will be accepted from May 1 until June 15, 2022. Please send submissions via email to our VPR editor, Dr. Katherine Malone. We will send out reminders as the date approaches. In the meantime, we hope you’ll consider submitting your work this upcoming Spring!

Please Welcome Our Newest Board Members

And the votes are in! Please welcome our four newest board members:

  • Priti Joshi
  • Matt Poland
  • Catherine Waters
  • Teja Varma Pusapati

We appreciate your willingness to help lead our organization during an exciting time in Victorian scholarship. And of course, thanks to all who voted!

Meet Our Newest Board Members

Priti Joshi is a Professor of English and Asian Studies at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington, located on the unceded territories of the Puyallup people. She has spent the last dozen years in the archives of 19th-century Indian newspapers and is the author of Empire News: The Anglo-Indian Press Writes India (SUNY Press, 2021). She has also published articles on: advertisements in Indian newspapers (in Victorian Periodicals Review); the India exhibit of the Crystal Palace (in Museum History Journal;); “scissors-and-paste” journalism in Indian newspapers (in Amodern). Trained as a literary scholar (she has published on canonical authors of the period such as Dickens, the Brontës, Frances Trollope, Henry Mayhew, George Eliot, and Edwin Chadwick), she well remembers the trepidation with which she presented her work on periodicals, something she had never been trained in. That first RSVP conference at Roehampton, however, put her at ease instantly: everyone was welcoming, curious and encouraging about the project, and infinitely generous in sharing resources and ideas.

Matt Poland is currently finishing his PhD in English at the University of Washington. His dissertation is titled “The Global Remediation of George Eliot and Charles Dickens: Books, Newspapers, Archives.” His work focuses on transnational periodical studies and nineteenth-century media history, as well as how these approaches enrich literary criticism and critical theory. His recent publications include “Commemorative Print: Serial Monuments during the Shakespeare Tercentenary Debates” (Journal of Victorian Culture 26.1 [April 2021]). His article “Middlemarch in Melbourne” is forthcoming in the Middlemarch 150th anniversary issue of George Eliot-George Henry Lewes Studies. His is also a contributing editor to At the Circulating Library: A Database of Victorian Fiction, 1837-1901. As RSVP’s outgoing Graduate Student Representative for North America and founding member of the RSVP Digital Events Committee, Matt is pleased to continue helping RSVP attract new and diverse members and audiences in the years to come.

Catherine Waters is Emeritus Professor of Victorian Literature and Print Culture at the University of Kent. She has been a member of RSVP since 2000. In 2009, she won the Robert and Vineta Colby Prize for her monograph, Commodity Culture in Dickens’s Household Words: The Social Life of Goods (Ashgate, 2008) and became a member of the Editorial Board of Victorian Periodicals Review in the same year. She has served several judging panels and committees for RSVP over the years, including previous tenure as a Director of the Board from 2017-19. Her most recent monograph, Special Correspondence and the Newspaper Press in Victorian Print Culture, 1850–1886, based upon research from her AHRC-funded project investigating of the writing of the Victorian ‘special correspondent’, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2019. With Ruth Brimacombe, she has also curated an online exhibition from this project, Picturing the News: The Art of Victorian Graphic Journalism. She is the author of various essays on Dickens, Sala and Victorian print culture.

Teja Varma Pusapati is an Assistant Professor in English at Shiv Nadar University, India. She was educated at the universities of Delhi (B.A., M.A., M.Phil in English) and Oxford (D.Phil in English). Her doctoral thesis elucidated how a few exceptional Victorian women broke into the male dominated avenues of political journalism and offered professional models for aspiring women journalists. She has held a TORCH Women in the Humanities writing fellowship at the University of Oxford (January–April 2017) and an Andrew W. Mellon fellowship at the Huntington library in California (May–June 2017). Her articles on Victorian women’s foreign correspondence, feminist journalism, and celebrity culture have appeared in Victorian Periodicals Review, Women’s Writing and Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies. She contributed a chapter on the English Woman’s Journal’s campaign for female doctors to Women, Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain 1830s-1900 (ed. by Alexis Easley, Clare Hill and Beth Rodgers). Her book chapter on Eliza Lynn Linton’s early radical writings has been accepted for publication in the Routledge Companion to Literature and Feminism. Her monograph, Model Women of the Press: Gender, Politics and Women’s Professional Journalism, 1850-1880, is forthcoming with Routledge. Her new project examines specialised nineteenth-century imperial journals. She received an RSVP Curran Fellowship (2017) for this project.

Curran Index Seeks PT Paid Research Assistant

We are delighted to announce that The Curran Index is recruiting a part-time, paid research assistant to help the current editors, Dr. Emily Bell and Dr. Lara Atkin, to expand the attribution data that is currently incorporated into the Index.

The Role

A Research Assistant is required to undertake archival work examining the Chambers Journal ledgers at the National Library of Scotland. The ideal candidate will be based in easy travel distance of the NLS and will have a research background in Victorian periodical studies, either studying for a PhD or post-doctoral.

The Work

You will be expected to examine the Chambers’s Journal Ledgers, particularly the notebooks containing details of the cash payments made to authors for contributions to the journal and other work between 1839-1903. High quality scans of these ledgers should be taken, and a research report produced highlighting any attribution data gathered from the ledgers that could be integrated into The Curran Index.

You will work independently but report to Dr. Lara Atkin and Dr. Emily Bell, co-editors of The Curran Index. This job is suitable for an advanced postgraduate or postdoctoral ECR, with a background in archival work and periodical studies, who is based within commutable distance from the National Library of Scotland. The timings for the work are flexible and can be fitted around existing research and teaching commitments.

How To Apply

More information on how to apply and a full job description can be found on the job listing at the University of Kent website.

 If you have any further questions, please email Dr. Atkin.

Household Words: How to Do Primary Source Research at Home

22nd April 2021, 6 pm UK / 12 pm CT

Illustration for Charles Dickens’ Bleak House by Phiz (Hablot K. Browne).

With research libraries around the world closed to readers due to the pandemic, many researchers have struggled to access primary sources necessary to the study of Victorian periodicals. At the same time, it is a truth universally acknowledged that since the 1990s, readers around the world have gained unprecedented access to Victorian print thanks to the proliferation of digital archives and bibliographies. What resources and methods enable us to research Victorian periodical culture during the pandemic?

RSVP will explore this question in an informal virtual roundtable with editors of open-access digital resources of great importance to the study of Victorian periodicals: Emily Bell (Curran Index; Charles Dickens Letters Project) and Stephen Basdeo and Jessica Thomas (George W.M. Reynolds Archive).

Dr. Stephen Basdeo researches 18th and 19thc popular literature and has recently focused on G.W.M. Reynolds and Pierce Egan Jnr. He is currently editing Reynolds’s newspaper writings for an open access website co-edited by Jessica Elizabeth Thomas.

Dr. Emily Bell is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Leeds. Her research interests lie in Victorian and Edwardian authorship, periodical culture, Dickens studies, and digital humanities. She is an editor for the Charles Dickens Letters Project, and co-editor of the Curran Index to Victorian periodicals. 

Jessica Elizabeth Thomas recently completed her MA in Nineteenth Century Literature and Culture at Chester University. Her BA in English was earned at Aberystwyth University. Currently, she is collaborating with Stephen Basdeo to edit Reynolds’s journalism. She has also catalogued Gladstone’s books and pamphlets at St. Deiniol’s library in Hawarden, for an AHRC-funded research project. 

Register Now

Register here for this free online event. Participation does not require RSVP membership and all are welcome to attend. If you have any questions about this event, please don’t hesitate to contact us and direct your enquiry to the Vice President.