RSVP

The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals

RSVP News

Digital Event on Periodical Studies Today: Multidisciplinary Analyses on 19 July 2024

Please join the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals’ next Digital Event, a book launch of Periodical Studies Today: Multidisciplinary Analyses (Brill 2022). We will be joined by the editors (Jutta Ernst, Oliver Scheiding, and Dagmar von Hoff) and several contributors who will discuss periodicals as relational artefacts, highlighting editorial constellations, material conditions, translation, design, marketing, and the consumption of newspapers and magazines from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. The meeting’s goal is to explore new and multidisciplinary ways to analyze periodicals.

Join Us July 19

Join us at the usual time – 8 a.m. PST / 11 a.m. EST / 4 p.m. GMT / 5 p.m. CET. As always, the event is free but registration is required to receive a zoom link.

Register Now

Our Participants

We will hear from the following editors and contributors to the volume:

  • Andreas Beck is Associate Professor of German Studies at Ruhr U Bochum, Germany, where he works on 18th-century comedies, architectural emblematics, and text-image relations in illustrated journals.
  • Jutta Ernst, Professor of American Studies at Mainz U, Germany, and co-founder of the research initiative “Transnational Periodical Cultures,” currently investigates the role of translation in 20th-century magazines.
  • Sabina Fazli is a postdoctoral research associate at the collaborative research center “Human Differentiation” at Mainz U, Germany, working on the representation of difference in contemporary magazines and zines.
  • Florian Freitag received his PhD in North American Literature from U Konstanz and has been a professor of American Studies at U Duisburg-Essen since 2019, where he works on theme parks, suburbia, and magazines.
  • Vincent Fröhlich is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Media Studies in Marburg, Germany. He heads a research project on illustrated film magazines (“Seeing Film between the Lines”) and is co-founder and editor of the open access journal periodICON: Studies in the Visual Culture of Journals.
  • Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink, Senior professor of French Cultural Studies and Intercultural Communication at Saarland U, Germany, is currently working on transcultural media history and on the translations of encyclopedias in the 18th to 20th centuries.
  • Mark Noonan is Professor of English at New York City College of Technology and former President of the Research Society for American Periodicals. His current book project is Revolutionary Ink: Colonial Printers of New York and the Promise of Democracy, scheduled for release in 2026.
  • Oliver Scheiding is Professor of American Studies at The Obama Institute, Mainz U, Germany. His research focuses on magazine studies, print culture, and print activism.

Congratulations to our 2024 Curran Fellowship Winners!

We are happy to announce nine RSVP Curran Fellows for 2024. The projects on which the Curran Fellows are working demonstrate the ongoing expansion and development of our fields of inquiry and objects of study. We very much look forward to hearing more about their work. Congratulations to:

  • Chandrika Kaul for Imperialism, Nationalism and Cultures of Print: Mahatma Gandhi & the Periodical Press,1880s-1914
  • Chieko Ichikawa for “Woman’s Corner” in The Co-operative
    News: Finding a Female Network to Care and Share
  • Clare Burnett for “Degradation and Ruin”: The Construction of
    Public Opinion About Cannabis in British and Australian Periodicals 1880-1901
  • James Mussell for Cast as Required: The Introduction of Hot-Metal Composition in the Late Nineteenth Century
  • Katherine Hobbs for Margaret Oliphant and the Woman Question in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine
  • Kristine Moruzi for Literary Cultures in Children’s Periodicals
  • Preeshita Biswas for Circulating Inter-Imperial News: Mapping Imperial Affinities and Resistance in British Periodicals in Meiji Japan, 1860 to 1900
  • Sarah Ghasedi for Sophia Jex-Blake’s Anonymous Journalism
    and the Battle for Female Doctors in Nineteenth-Century Britain
  • Wanda Ieremia-Allan for O le Lamepa o le Pasefika – The Pacific Lantern

Ongoing Support for Periodicals Research

The Curran Fellowships are a set of travel and research grants intended to aid scholars studying 19th-century British magazines and newspapers in making use of primary print and archival sources. Made possible through the generosity of the late Eileen Curran, Professor Emerita of English, Colby College, and inspired by her pioneering research on Victorian periodicals, the Fellowships are awarded annually.

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