RSVP

The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals

RSVP Digital Events

Come Discuss Altick’s The Shows of London on June 9

Join us for the next RSVP Digital Events event on Friday, June 9 at 4 p.m. London / 11 a.m. EDT / 8 a.m. PDT, when we will host an informal reading group and discussion of three chapters from Richard Altick’s The Shows of London (1978).

Register Here

“What did nineteenth-century readers respond to that later readers have trouble discerning? The short answer, I believe, is spectacle.”

Stephen Arata

“People mutht be amuthed.”

Mr. Sleary

The Shows of London is a remarkable archive of the spectacles nineteenth-century audiences loved and how they intersected with periodical culture. For the first RSVP Digital Events Reading Group, we wanted to pick a text that feels like a classic but is perhaps one that periodicals scholars haven’t engaged with in some time, or at all.

Recent work by Clare Pettitt and others shows the continued pertinence and vitality that The Shows of London offers for expanding our research methods into the wider Victorian media ecosystem. For the reading group meeting, we will consider three chapters from Altick’s text:

  • The Introduction
  • “Panoramas: Topics of the Times”
  • “The Noble Savage Reconsidered”

These three cover a breadth of spectacles that are also relevant to ongoing discussions about race and transimperial culture. Upon registering, you will receive a confirmation email that includes a link to PDFs of the chapters as well as the Zoom meeting link.

Join Us June 9

All RSVP digital events are free and open to the public. Complete the brief registration form below to receive the Zoom link and PDFs of the readings.

Register Now

Come for the Conversation

This will be an informal meeting for busy people, so participants are invited to read as much or as little as they have time for, and to come along for conversation and conviviality even if they don’t get to everything.

For those who are especially keen or want to keep reading afterward, we will also make available completely optional chapters by Clare Pettitt and Sadiah Qureshi to show recent engagement with The Shows of London and its subjects. We hope to see you there!

Next “Pick-A-Periodical” Digital Event Next Friday, 5 May

Press News masthead, vol. 5, no. 49 (15 Jan. 1870)

Join the RSVP Digital Events committee for our next “Pick-A-Periodical” event on May 5 at 10 a.m. CST / 11 a.m. EST / 4 p.m. GMT! During this informal session, our host Patrick Leary will open up a discussion on a fascinating but little-known trade journal, Press News.

Everyone in the periodicals trade called it “Press News,” but the full title of this now obscure periodical bristled with broader ambitions: “The London, Colonial, and Provincial Press News.”  In an almost 50-year run that began in 1866, Press News aimed to be much more than simply a trade journal for the printing trade, although it was certainly that, too.  Under the direction of founder William Dorrington (1816-1894)–who in his long career had moved easily among his roles as printer, poet, dramatist, journalist, and editor–the paper covered the “news” of everything to do with the world of Victorian magazines and newspapers. For historians today, Press News offers up a literary history of late-Victorian Britain and its empire as seen from the print-shop floor.

Register Here and Join Us May 5

All RSVP digital events are free and open to the public. Complete the brief registration form below to receive the Zoom link.

Register Now

An Informal Yet Informative Collaborative Discussion

During our time together, Patrick will lead an informal ramble through Dorrington’s extraordinary but little-known journal to see what it can tell us about its time, and how its expansive notion of “the literary world” might inform our own understanding of 19th-century journalism. After this preamble, we hope the ensuing discussion will lean not just on Patrick’s insights but also observations from our audience members.

To that end, we highly encourage individuals to peruse the three volumes of Press News freely available on Hathitrust ahead of the event. Whether you want to quickly glance through one volume or deeply examine one or all three is completely up to you, of course. We know how busy you are. Things you might consider:

  • What articles or imagery stands out to you?
  • How does the structure or content contribute to Dorrington’s ambitious vision for the periodical?
  • How do the formal or informal elements of the magazine characterize his intended audience? What does it say about their interests?
  • What do we gain by “reading sideways” as suggested by Linda Hughes?

These are just a few questions to get you started, and by no means do we expect anyone to spend more of their precious time on this exercise than they want to. We merely hope to enrich our collective understanding of what makes 19th-century periodicals so rewarding as both objects and subjects of study.

Need Help With Periodical Research?

RSVP Digital Events can help! Join us Friday, April 7 for our first “Collaborative Learning and Troubleshooting” workshop with Jiwon Min on “The Making and Unmaking of Krakatau: Reading Nineteenth Century Periodicals, the Volcano and Climate Change.” The workshop will take place Friday, April 7 at 8 a.m. PST / 11 a.m. EST / 4 p.m. GMT.

Front page of Krakatau Internationale Courant (22 Sept. 1883)

Jiwon will share international media coverage (newspapers and periodicals that relied on telegraphs and new underwater cables), weather observations and maps (that deployed a range of illustrative technologies), and other accounts in the periodical press. The Krakatau eruption and these reports fueled scientific investigations, as well as the literary imagination (Alfred Tennyson, Gerald Manley Hopkins, and M.P Shiel) and art (Frederick Edwin Church and William Ascroft). Jiwon brings these materials together and considers the role of the press in producing global ecological interconnectedness and a phenomenon called “weather weirding.”

Jiwon Min is a postdoctoral fellow in the English Department at University of Delaware. Her research interests are in nineteenth-century British literature and culture, Victorian ecologies, the Gothic, and climate change narratives in fiction and non-fiction.

Join us April 7

 RSVP digital events are free and open to the public. Complete the brief registration form below to receive the Zoom link.

Register Here

Want to Learn About the Indian Punch?

Cover page of Avadh Punch 1878
Cover page of Avadh Punch, 1878. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

RSVP’s Digital Events committee is pleased to welcome Maryam Sikander for our next virtual event. As the inaugural presenter in our Speaker’s Forum series, Maryam will deliver a talk titled “Avadh Punch (1877-1938): Transformation of Colonial Text and Context” on Wednesday, March 1 at 8 a.m. PST / 11 a.m. EST / 4 p.m. GMT / 9:30 p.m. IST.

Maryam Sikander is a Junior Fellow at Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi. She was awarded our 2021 Sally Mitchell Dissertation Prize for her PhD thesis which she completed at SOAS University of London in 2021. Her thesis explored the relationship between the Victorian magazine Punch and its Indian rendition Avadh Punch. Previously, she has also been awarded a Curran Fellowship by RSVP to further her research on Anglo-Indian Punches.

Join Us March 1

As always, RSVP digital events are free and open to the public. Complete the brief registration form below to receive the Zoom link.

Register Now

Digital Events Return Feb. 3 with “Pick A Periodical”

RSVP’s Digital Events Committee is back in action!

We’re delighted that Lorraine Janzen Kooistra will inaugurate our year’s events on Friday, February 3 at 8 a.m. PST/10 a.m. CST/ 11 a.m. EST / 4 p.m. GMT. She will be guiding attendees in the first of our recurring “Pick a Periodical” event series with a discussion of Volume 5 (April 1895) of The Yellow Book.

What Is Pick A Periodical?

Pick A Periodical is a new event series we will host…periodically…in which we ask a scholar and member of RSVP to select an issue (or range) of a newspaper or periodical that we will circulate ahead of time. Attendees should browse the issue prior to the event. Drawing on the lead’s expertise and attendees’ observations, our event time will be devoted to discussing what everyone found revelatory, fascinating, perplexing, or otherwise interesting about the issue(s) in question. In so doing, we hope to generate collaborative discussion, collective learning, and congenial conversation!

Join Us February 3

As with most RSVP digital events, this event is free and open to all, though we welcome and encourage you to become a member of RSVP if you are not already one. You will receive a Zoom link info upon registration. We hope to see you there!

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Why Volume 5 of The Yellow Book?

Dr. Kooistra has selected Volume 5 (April 1895) of The Yellow Book (open access!) to kick off our first “Pick a Periodical” event on February 3. The Yellow Book offers a unique opportunity to read a single issue of a magazine in relation to its editorial processes and title’s overall brand in the context of an international media event and its fallout. The April 1895 arrest of Oscar Wilde, who was carrying a yellow-bound book (mistakenly identified by the press as the “Yellow Book,” but actually a French novel), resulted in the firing of Aubrey Beardsley as art editor of the magazine, and the removal of his illustrations from the volume before it went to print.

Since then, scholarship has typically examined The Yellow Book along the fault line of before and after Beardsley. The actual contents of the watershed Volume 5—its selections, deletions, substitutions, sequences, and adjacencies—have received only minimal attention.

Dr. Kooistra will open the discussion by drawing attention to a single artwork, Constantin Guys’ “A Sketch.” We’ll then turn to your observations, comments, thoughts, and questions about the volume, its contents, contiguities, images, etc.

Register for this FREE event here

Stay Tuned for More Events in 2023

In addition to our “Pick a Periodical” series, Digital Events has many other kinds of events planned, including:

  • A Speaker’s Forum, where we hear of members’ work
  • Periodic Support sessions, or informal sessions for troubleshooting and solving research and pedagogical questions
  • A Reading Group, in which we discuss an important, relevant, or thought-provoking piece of scholarship within periodical studies

We have a full slate – an event almost every month! – and hope you will join us as RSVP continues to build community and intellectual exchanges through multimodal events and communication.

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