RSVP’s Digital Events committee is delighted to celebrate new books by two long-standing members, staunch supporters, and Board members: Teja Varma Pusapati’s Model Women of the Press: Gender, Politics and Women’s Professional Journalism, 1850–1880 (Routledge 2024) and Mary Shannon’s Billy Waters is Dancing: Or, How a Black Sailor Found Fame in Regency Britain (Yale 2024).
Join Us Friday, September 13
We’ll meet at the usual time: 8 a.m. PT / 11 a.m. ET / 4 p.m. BT / 5 p.m. CET for a 60-minute session.
As always, this event is free but registration is required to receive a zoom link.
Exciting New Directions in Periodicals’ Scholarship
Teja Pusapati’s book elucidates the mid-century rise of ‘model women of the press’: atypical but exemplary women journalists who stormed the male bastions of social and political journalism. It draws on extensive archival research to offer fresh insights into the working lives of celebrity writers like Harriet Martineau and lesser-known figures such as Eliza Meteyard and Harriet Ward. Ranging across diverse print formats, from daily newspapers and abolitionist weeklies to the explicitly feminist English Woman’s Journal and the armed-services focussed United Service Magazine, the book shows how women’s serious, high-minded contributions to the Victorian press constituted a crucial aspect of the professionalization of authorship and the expansion of female work in nineteenth century England.
Mary L. Shannon’s book tells the story of Regency London’s forgotten Black celebrity, the celebrated “King of the Beggars.” Likely born into enslavement in 1770s New York, Waters became a Royal Navy sailor. After losing his leg in a fall from the rigging, the talented and irrepressible Waters became London’s most famous street performer. Shannon’s biography draws together surviving traces of Waters’ life to bring us closer to the historical figure underlying them. Considering Waters’ influence on the London stage and his echoing resonances in visual art, and writing by Douglass, Dickens, and Thackeray, Shannon asks us to reconsider Black presences in nineteenth-century popular culture. This is a vital attempt to recover a life from historical obscurity—and a fascinating account of what it meant to find fame in the Regency metropolis.
About the Authors
Teja Varma Pusapati is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence, Delhi NCR. She is a former RSVP board member. Teja’s work has appeared in Victorian Periodicals Review, Women’s Writing and Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies and she has contributed book chapters to Women, Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain 1830s-1900 and the Routledge Companion to Literature and Feminism. Research on the book was supported by a TORCH Women in the Humanities writing fellowship at the University of Oxford and an Andrew W. Mellon fellowship at the Huntington library in California.
Mary Shannon is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Roehampton, London, outgoing RSVP board member and president of the GWM Reynolds Society. She’s the author of the Colby award-winning Dickens, Reynolds, and Mayhew on Wellington Street . Billy Waters was funded by an RSVP Peterson Fellowship and a Leverhulme Fellowship. Find more about Dr. Shannon’s work.
