RSVP

The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals

VPR News

2024 VPR Prize Winners Announced!

We are delighted to announce the winners of the 2024 VPR Prizes!

Expanding the Field into Indian Children’s Periodicals

This year’s Expanding the Field Prize goes to Nilkantha Pal (Indian Institute of Science Education and Research) for his essay “Imagining Childhood in Colonial Bengal: Children’s Periodicals, Readership, and Vernacular Publishing, ca. 1880-1920.”

This work impressed the judges “with its erudition, its broad scope of reference, and its nuanced application of Robert Darnton’s circulation model of print culture to a colonial context.” The Expanding the Field Prize is awarded annually for an outstanding essay that diversifies the existing geographic, racial, and ethnic composition of nineteenth-century periodical studies.

Our 2024 VanArsdel Prize Winner

The winner of this year’s VanArsdel Prize is Adele Guyton (KU Leuven) for her essay “‘A Certain Amount of Scientific Education’: Science, Sensation, and the Everyman Narrator in the Serialised War of the Worlds (1897).”

The committee noted, “This is a strong piece of work with a clearly focused and sustained argument that uses periodical studies to make an interesting contribution to readings of the novel and rethinks assumptions regarding class and readerly subjectivity.” The VanArsdel Prize is awarded annually to the best graduate student essay investigating Victorian periodicals and newspapers. The prize was established in 1990 to honor Rosemary VanArsdel, a founding member of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals whose groundbreaking research continues to shape the field of nineteenth-century periodical studies.

Stay Tuned to See These Articles in Print

Congratulations to the prize winners, who will each receive a $500 award and publication in an upcoming issue of Victorian Periodicals Review, and thank you to everyone who submitted an essay. We had a strong pool of submissions, and we especially want to thank this year’s judges, Carolyn Betensky and Flore Janssen, for their careful reading and generous feedback.

Call for Contributors to RSVP Bibliography

We Need Your Help!

RSVP seeks contributors to its biennial bibliography, which will be published in Victorian Periodicals Review in Fall 2023.

Contributors to the bibliography are asked to adopt three to ten scholarly journals from a list, identify articles published between December 2017 and December 2020 that have direct relevance to the study of Victorian journalism, and compile a list of annotated entries.

All contributors are acknowledged in the published bibliography. Entries will be due in May 2023.

If you are interested in contributing to this project or can recommend someone, please email Dr. Kristin Kondrlik at for the complete guidelines and list of journals.

Call for VPR Submissions Editors

“Printing-Office (The Victoria Press) in Great Coram-Street, for the Employment of Women as Compositors” from The Illustrated London News (Jun. 16, 1861). British Library, P.P. 7611

Victorian Periodicals Review (VPR) is expanding its editorial board to include Submissions Editors who will facilitate the double-blind peer review process. The journal invites expressions of interest from individuals working in nineteenth-century periodical studies who meet the criteria described below.

What’s Involved

Each Submissions Editor takes responsibility for securing specialist reviewers for approximately three submissions per year. On the basis of the reviewers’ reports, the Submissions Editor then provides a recommendation to the Editor. In the case of a recommendation for major revisions, the Submissions Editor’s opinion is usually sought on resubmission.

Submissions Editors will play a major role in shaping the journal and its critical interests in the years to come. Besides cultivating exciting new work in our field, Submissions Editors are encouraged to develop ideas for the journal’s occasional features, including Retrospectives, Review Conversations, and Round Tables. The VPR editorial team is unpaid and operates on a voluntary basis. Members of the editorial board serve for a three-year term with the option to renew.

Who Should Apply?

VPR is deliberately seeking to diversify its editorial board, and we encourage expressions of interest from scholars from a wide range of backgrounds, specializations, and career levels. We welcome applications evidencing one or more of the following:

  • Expertise in nineteenth-century periodicals or newspapers in any area or discipline. We are particularly looking to expand the board’s coverage of transatlantic, transnational, and transimperial print culture; the provincial press; working-class periodicals; comic and illustrated periodicals; race and ethnicity; and the long nineteenth century.
  • Editorial experience, such as working on a journal or digital project, editing special issues or collections of essays, or supervising MA/Ph.D. students.
  • A proven track record of collegiality and team contributions to the field through the activities of learned societies or conference organization.
  • Nineteenth-century subject expertise developed within organizations outside the university, such as libraries, museums, or galleries.

How to Apply

Interested candidates should send a one-page statement explaining their interest in the role and a one-page CV to VPR Editor Katherine Malone by Monday, January 9, 2023.

VanArsdel Prize Winner Announced

The 2021 VanArsdel Prize has been awarded to Elizabeth Howard (PhD Candidate, University of Minnesota) for her essay, “‘Keeping Christmas’ on the Page: the Adelaide Observer, Alice in Wonderland, and the Australian Periodical at Play.”

The committee commented, “This is an excellently written, interesting essay that focuses on an understudied area to make an original contribution to the field of periodical studies. Its astute analysis of the Adelaide Observer highlights this newspaper’s status as a colonial/settler production but contains insights more broadly relevant to newspaper culture in the Victorian world.” 

The VanArsdel Prize, established in 1990 to honor Rosemary VanArsdel, is awarded annually to the best graduate student essay investigating Victorian periodicals and newspapers. The winning essay will be published in Victorian Periodicals Review. Congratulations, Elizabeth Howard!

CFP: Special Issue of VPR for Summer 2022

Guest editors Laurel Brake, Fionnuala Dillane, and Mark Turner invite essays of 5,000-7,000 words in length (including notes and bibliography) for Victorian Periodical Review‘s next special issue, “The Book Review in the Long Nineteenth Century,” to be published Summer 2022.

Book reviews, reviewing, and reviewers pervade the nineteenth-century press, but scholarly attention to the genre, the practice, and to reviewer networks is disproportionately sparse. The genre of reviews filled the early nineteenth-century quarterlies to the extent that they were known generically as Reviews. While retaining their name, Reviews transformed their frequency and contents, surviving as monthly miscellanies, without losing their claim to superior status among magazines, newspapers, and weeklies that also published reviews in profusion and in diverse forms. Although unheralded as a form, they occupied a significant space in weeklies such as the Athenaeum, Spectator, Literary Gazette, and Saturday Review and monthlies such as the Review of Reviews. Many dailies developed literary supplements that functioned as review spaces. The book review, this defining feature of our objects of study, has yet to receive sustained critical attention.

Topics To Consider

This special issue seeks to invite scrutiny of reviews across the press in the long nineteenth century as cultural objects and cultural practices, alive to questions of class, gender, race, and nationality. Submissions might address any of the following:

    • The Review and book reviews
    • Taxonomies, forms, and genres (e.g., occasional notes; causeries; notices; essays-like-review; review-like-essay)
    • Exclusions and/or inclusions
    • Hierarchies of print
    • Critical language of book reviews
    • Conventions of book reviewing
    • Book review as dialogue
    • Cultural value of the book review
    • Repurposing, remediating, recycling book reviews
    • Uses of anonymity and/or signature (including pseudonyms)
    • Affects of the book review
    • The book review in regional, national, and/or transnational contexts
    • Economics of the book review
    • Book review networks/Networks of print
    • The book review in relation to other reviewing practices/forms (e.g., of performances; art exhibitions; concerts)
    • Editing review pages
    • Politics of the book review
    • The book review and the development of disciplines

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Submit Your Abstract by 15 January 2021

Please signal your interest by 15 January 2021 with a 200-word abstract and brief (50-word) biography. Responses will be sent by 15 February 2021.

Submission deadline for final draft of selected articles of 5,000-7,000 words in length (including notes and bibliography) is 15 August 2021 for publication in 2022.

Both abstracts and final essays should be submitted to Laurel, Mark and Fionnuala by emailing 19cReviewing@gmail.com. You may download a PDF of these guidelines here for reference.