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
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.
