RSVP

The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals

RSVP Digital Events

Exploring the 19thC with the HathiTrust Digital Library

Want to get the most out of using the HathiTrust Digital Library during your next research project? At RSVP’s next Digital Event, “‘On the dusty shelves of libraries’: Exploring the 19th-century with the HathiTrust Digital Library,” we will hear about HathiTrust’s resources, tools and services for computational analysis from John Walsh, Director of the HathiTrust Research Center and Associate Professor of Information and Library Science at Indiana University.

Join us on Zoom on February 16 at 8 a.m. PST / 11 a.m. EST / 4 p.m. GMT / 5 p.m. CET and learn more about how to make the most out of using the HathiTrust Digital Library!

Register Now to Receive the Zoom Link

As always, this event is free to all and open to the public. Join us on February 16!

Register Here

About Our Speaker

John’s research applies computational methods to the study of literary and historical documents. He is an editor of several digital scholarly editions, including:

Other research interests include comic books, especially formal, material, and bibliographic aspects of comics and the role of the reader and fan in comics and comic book culture; he developed Comic Book Markup Language (CBML) for scholarly encoding of comics and graphic novels.

For more about John’s projects, visit John’s website.

Join Us on January 19 to Discuss Transnational Feminism and the ‘New Indian Woman’

Your digital-neighborhood friends at RSVP’s Digital Events (Katy Birch, Sourav Chatterjee, Ali Hatapçi, Andrew Hobbs, and Priti Joshi) are happy to announce another year of talks, discussions, exchanges, and learning on all matters related to 19th-century periodicals of Britain and its empire.

Front page of newspaper, "The Woman's Signal," with header followed by three columns of text. A photograph of an Indian woman dominates the center column.

At our first event of 2024, we will hear about transnational feminism in periodicals from Tarini Bhamburkar in a talk entitled “Characterising the ‘New Indian Woman’: Indian Feminism and Indian Women’s Interviews in the Women’s Penny Paper and The Woman’s Signal.”

The talk will take place Friday, January 19 at 8 a.m. PST / 11 a.m. EST / 4 p.m. GMT / 5 p.m. CET.

Join Us Friday, January 19

Events are, as always, free and open to the public. Please register in advance to receive the Zoom link.

Register Here

About Our Speaker

Tarini Bhamburkar is a postgraduate researcher at the University of Bristol. She will be discussing how two Victorian feminist periodicals’ – the Women’s Penny Paper and The Woman’s Signal – coverage of the feminist activities of women in late Victorian India showcased an effort to inform British women of Indian women’s progress and also to embed the discourse of Indian women’s reform within British women’s own reform ideas.

The talk will also consider the representation and self-representation of two Indian women’s rights advocates – and the only racial minority – whose interviews were published in these periodicals, locating the analyses of these interviews in the context and perception of the ‘New Woman’ in both colony and metropole.

Tarini was also recently awarded VPR’s Expanding the Field prize. Congratulations, Tarini!

The Curran Index: Attribution and the Work of Historical Recovery in Periodicals Research

RSVP’s next Digital Event, to be held October 27, will feature Dr. Lars Atkin and Dr. Emily Bell, co-editors of The Curran Index, discussing The Curran Index: Attribution and the Work of Historical Recovery in Periodicals Research.

As Patrick Leary has highlighted in his recent essay, ‘Bringing Writers Out of the Shadows: Attribution Research and the Recovery of Identity’, attribution research can enable the recovery of the identities, biographies and networks of writers rendered invisible by the conventions of anonymity that governed the production periodicals during much of the nineteenth century.

In this digital roundtable, Dr. Lars Atkin and Dr. Emily Bell, co-editors of The Curran Index, an open-access and ever-expanding database of more than 171,000 attributions for 58 nineteenth-century periodicals, introduce the Index, its new interface, and new possibilities for periodicals research – including the addition of over 2000 new attributions to Chambers’s (Edinburgh) Journal and more than a hundred newly identified contributors.

In the second half, drawing on recent projects to enhance the database and to use its contents in creative ways, this session will focus on how attribution research can bring to light the ‘shadow’ history of women journalists and poets’ extensive contribution to the British periodical press. It will emphasize how bringing the identities of such writers out of the shadows can aid urgent efforts to ‘undiscipline’ and ‘widen’ our understanding of what constitutes the nineteenth-century literary canon. Finally, this roundtable will highlight the ways in which you too can contribute to, and make use of, the attribution data available in the database.

Please Join us Friday, October 27

This free virtual event will take place via Zoom at the usual time:

8 a.m. PST / 11 a.m. EST / 4 p.m. GMT

Register Here

We ask that participants please read Leary’s short essay, ‘Bringing Writers Out of the Shadows: Attribution Research and the Recovery of Identity,’ ahead of of the session.

Writing Your Curran Application: Advice & Guidelines

from Punch, or the London Charivari, vol. 34 (13 Mar. 1858): 102. Image courtesy of Gale Primary Sources.

Join us October 12, 2023 at 4 p.m. (BST) / 11 a.m. (EST) / 8 a.m. (PST) for a special RSVP Digital Event on writing competitive grant applications!

At this 50 minute information and advice session, Russ Wyland, long-time RSVP member and Curran Award Committee member will talk us through the Curran Fellowships. Russ will offer specific advice on application requirements and guidelines on how to write a competitive application.

There will be 15-20 minutes for all of your questions. This session should be of interest to any first time fellowship application writers; those who want to know more about this programme; and those who would like to rework a Curran application from previous years.

We Hope You’ll Join Us!

Like all RSVP Digital Events, this event is free and open to the public, and will be recorded. Register below to receive the Zoom link

Register Here

The Art Historians are Coming!

A black-and white engraving of a Victorian woman examining a painting with a magnifying glass in an art studio.

Join the RSVP Digital Events committee on Friday, September 8 at 8am PST / 11am EST / 4pm GMT to hear from:

Hala Auji, who will speak on “(Other)worldly Musings: Transnational Imagery in Arabic Periodicals” 

and

Tom Young, who will discuss “The ‘Autographic Self’: Facsimile Signatures and Lithographic Portraiture at the Crossroads of Liberalism, Romanticism and Nationalism, c.1800–60”

Hala Auji is an Associate Professor of Art History and the Hamad bin Khalifa Endowed Chair for Islamic Art at Virginia Commonwealth University and author of Printing Arab Modernity: Book Culture and The American Press in Nineteenth-Century Beirut. Her talk will cover illustrated nineteenth-century Arabic periodicals, published in Egypt and Ottoman Syria, that demonstrate how press editors were interested in popularizing all sorts of knowledge, as a “public benefit,” while concurrently serving up forms of visual entertainment through myriad engravings that belonged to local and transnational networks of artistic exchange. 

Tom Young is a Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Art Histories at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London and author of Unmaking the East India Company: British Art and Political Reform in Colonial India, c.1813–58. He will speak from his current project about the 19th century global spread of lithography, specifically about a portrait format that was typically produced using lithography and frequently used in periodicals, especially literary magazines (although also as book frontispieces, sometimes stand-alone prints).

Join Us September 8

All RSVP digital events are free and open to the public. Please register by clicking the button below to receive the Zoom link.

Register Here

Let’s Talk Manuscript Periodicals on August 4

Join us for the next RSVP digital event – a panel discussion of “Manuscript Periodicals of the
Long Nineteenth Century” – on Friday, August 4 at the usual time (4 p.m. BST / 11 a.m. EDT / 8 a.m. PDT). Our three speakers will introduce the manuscript periodicals they work on, followed by time for questions and discussion.

  • Mary Chadwick will be talking about two privately circulated late-eighteenth-century periodicals – The Breakfast Courant, or the Bread and Butter Chronicle and The Denbighshire Gazette Extraordinary – produced by guests at winter festivities at the Wynnstay estate in north Wales.
  • Catherine Sloan will be introducing us to the Sneezer, a manuscript magazine made at King’s College School, London, in 1885.
  • Abigail Droge will discuss the Dickenson Road Magazine, a manuscript magazine created by the Rusholme Wesleyan Mutual Improvement Society in Manchester in the 1880s and 90s. 

The presentations will explore themes such as reading communities, the relationship
between manuscript magazines and their print counterparts, and the way that local and
national events come together in these small-scale magazines.

Join Us August 4 via Zoom

All RSVP digital events are free and open to the public. Please register for this free event by clicking the button below. You will receive a Zoom link upon registration.

Register Now