RSVP is pleased to announce the winners of our 2023 grants, fellowships, and prizes!
Our Sally Mitchell Dissertation Prize Winner
We are very happy to announce that the winner of our third-ever Sally Mitchell Dissertation Prize is Mila Daskalova for her dissertation, “Printing and Periodical Culture in the Nineteenth-Century Asylum”! The dissertation examines periodicals printed in mental asylums in the United States and Britain between 1836 and 1878, and was described by the adjudicating committee as “exemplifying periodical scholarship of the highest tier. […] It generates a rich new understanding of how such periodicals operated in the asylum context—as a means of therapy, self-expression, and community-building—and circulated beyond it.”
The Sally Mitchell Dissertation Prize is awarded annually to the best Ph.D. dissertation that explores the 19th-century British periodical press (including magazines, newspapers, and serial publications of all kinds) as an object of study in its own right, not as a source of material for other historical topics. The prize was established to honor Sally Mitchell, a longstanding and highly valued member of RSVP’s leadership, and a committed and ardent mentor to graduate students.
Joint Winners for the Linda H. Peterson Fellowhip
Linda H. Peterson Fellowships support the study of any aspect of the periodical press in any of its manifold forms within and outside of the British Empire, where British magazines and newspapers were bought, sold, and read during the “long nineteenth century” (ca. 1780-1914). RSVP is delighted that there was an exceptionally high number of applicants this year, making for a very strong field. We congratulate our following joint winners for the 2023-24 year, each of whom will receive a fellowship:
- Robert Burroughs, for his project, “S. J. Celestine Edwards, the ‘Black Champion’ of Victorian Oral and Print Culture.” The adjudicating committee noted that “This is a timely, deeply researched proposal…It spotlights the first Black editor of periodicals in Britain, while also pursuing interesting theoretical implications about oral, written, and print modalities; about Celestine Edwards’s cultural engagements; and about Black British experience then and now.”
- Candace Ward, for her project, “The Caribbean Cosmopolis: Pan-Caribbean Identities and Nineteenth-Century Colonial Print Culture.” As the committee noted, “This proposal continues the urgent project of globalizing periodicals studies and complicating narratives about imperial relations, identity, and colonial archives with case studies from the Caribbean.”
Peterson Fellowships total $17,500 annually and are intended to support the researcher(s) awarded for a period equivalent to four full-time months. The Linda H. Peterson Fellowship was named after the widely influential Yale professor and longtime RSVP Board member and Vice President, and created with funds from a generous bequest to RSVP by the late Eileen Curran, pioneering researcher and Emerita Professor of English at Colby College.
RSVP’s Field Development Grant Winners Take on AI in Periodical Studies
This year’s RSVP Field Development Grant has been awarded to Thomas Smits (PI), with Paul Fyfe (North Carolina State University), Julia Thomas (Cardiff University), and Ben Lee (University of Washington Information School / Kluge Fellow Library of Congress) for their exciting project, “Multimodal AI, Image Analysis, and the Illustrated Periodical Press.”
The committee commented that “This is an outstanding proposal by four experienced scholars working at the forefront of machine learning methods for studying illustrations in the nineteenth-century press… It is exemplary in its collaborative and interdisciplinary approach it promises to undertake innovative scholarship that has a notable outward facing component.”
The RSVP Field Development Grant was created with funds from a generous bequest to RSVP by the late Eileen Curran, pioneering researcher and Emerita Professor of English at Colby College. The grant is intended to support an individual or a team of researchers in creating resources that will facilitate the work of other scholars in their studies of 19th-century British newspapers and periodicals.
Thanks to All Committee Members and Applicants
We very much look forward to seeing more of everyone’s wonderful research. We also offer our deepest thanks to all of the RSVP members and external experts who served on the adjudicating committees: it is a tremendous service to your community!
