RSVP

The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals

RSVP News & Events

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.

Join Us in September for a Few Book Launches

RSVP’s Digital Events committee is delighted to celebrate new books by two long-standing members, staunch supporters, and Board members: Teja Varma Pusapati’s Model Women of the Press: Gender, Politics and Women’s Professional Journalism, 1850–1880 (Routledge 2024) and Mary Shannon’s Billy Waters is Dancing: Or, How a Black Sailor Found Fame in Regency Britain (Yale 2024).

Join Us Friday, September 13

We’ll meet at the usual time: 8 a.m. PT / 11 a.m. ET / 4 p.m. BT / 5 p.m. CET for a 60-minute session.

As always, this event is free but registration is required to receive a zoom link.

Register Here

Exciting New Directions in Periodicals’ Scholarship

Teja Pusapati’s book elucidates the mid-century rise of ‘model women of the press’: atypical but exemplary women journalists who stormed the male bastions of social and political journal­ism. It draws on extensive archival research to offer fresh insights into the working lives of celebrity writers like Harriet Martineau and lesser-known figures such as Eliza Meteyard and Harriet Ward. Ranging across diverse print formats, from daily newspapers and abolitionist weeklies to the explicitly feminist English Woman’s Journal and the armed-services focussed United Service Magazine, the book shows how women’s serious, high-minded contributions to the Victorian press constituted a crucial aspect of the professionalization of authorship and the expansion of female work in nineteenth century England.

Mary L. Shannon’s book tells the story of Regency London’s forgotten Black celebrity, the celebrated “King of the Beggars.” Likely born into enslavement in 1770s New York, Waters became a Royal Navy sailor. After losing his leg in a fall from the rigging, the talented and irrepressible Waters became London’s most famous street performer. Shannon’s biography draws together surviving traces of Waters’ life to bring us closer to the historical figure underlying them. Considering Waters’ influence on the London stage and his echoing resonances in visual art, and writing by Douglass, Dickens, and Thackeray, Shannon asks us to reconsider Black presences in nineteenth-century popular culture. This is a vital attempt to recover a life from historical obscurity—and a fascinating account of what it meant to find fame in the Regency metropolis. 

About the Authors

Teja Varma Pusapati is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence, Delhi NCR. She is a former RSVP board member. Teja’s work has appeared in Victorian Periodicals Review, Women’s Writing and Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies and she has contributed book chapters to Women, Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain 1830s-1900 and the Routledge Companion to Literature and Feminism. Research on the book was supported by a TORCH Women in the Humanities writing fellowship at the University of Oxford and an Andrew W. Mellon fellowship at the Huntington library in California. 

Mary Shannon is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Roehampton, London, outgoing RSVP board member and president of the GWM Reynolds Society. She’s the author of the Colby award-winning  Dickens, Reynolds, and Mayhew on Wellington Street . Billy Waters was funded by an RSVP Peterson Fellowship and a Leverhulme Fellowship. Find more about Dr. Shannon’s work.

Extra! Extra! Hot Off the Press!

Join the RSVP Digital Event team for a star-studded book launch of British Writers, Popular Literature and New Media Innovation, 1820-1845 (edited by Alexis Easley) on August 30!

Moderated by Alexis Easley, this 90-minute session will showcase the work of various participants in this new EUP volume, which takes up the emergence of a mass reading public during the early decades of the nineteenth century, a period of creative innovation in the popular press.

For more details, read the book’s abstract and table of contents.

Our speakers include: 

  • Alexis Easley, Chair and Professor of English at the University of St. Thomas
  • Brian Maidment, Emeritus Professor of the History of Print at Liverpool John Morres University
  • Linda Hughes, Addie Levy Professor of Literature at Texas Christian University
  • Jennie Batchelor, Head and Professor of English and Related Literature at the University of York
  • Caley Ehnes, Professor of Literature and Composition at the College of the Rockies
  • Helena Goodwyn, Vice-Chancellor’s Senior Research Fellow, Northumbria University
  • Sofia Prado Huggins, Project Manager for the Uproot Project
  • Françoise Baillet, Professor of British History and Culture, Caen Normandie University
  • Elizabeth Howard, Assistant Professor of English, Bethlehem College

Join Us Friday, August 30

This is a 90-minute session to accommodate all speakers, but we’ll convene at the usual time: 8 a.m. PST / 11 a.m. EST / 4 p.m. GMT / 5 p.m. CET. This event is free but registration is required to receive the Zoom link.

Register Here

Introducing A New Digital Event Series: A Panel on “Class” Periodicals

RSVP’s Digital Events is pleased to inaugurate the first in a recurring series of panel-style presentations (configured to be user-friendly for online consumption and participation) on Friday, August 9!

“Class” Periodicals: Contents, Categories, Publics will take up “class” periodicals, a term developed to evade the stamp tax. Our panelists will present short papers that address the emergence of this variety of periodicals and their delineation of “general news”; the characteristics and audience of trade and professional journals of print; and medical journals like the Lancet and its conception of “general news.”

Following the presentations, we will have time for robust discussion.

Join Us on Friday, August 9

We’ll convene at our regular time at 8 a.m. PST / 11 a.m. EST / 4 p.m. BST / 5 p.m. CET.

As always, our digital events are free but registration is required to receive the Zoom link.

Register Here

Presentations & Speakers

The following papers will be given:

Drawing of a collection of long-stemmed mushrooms

“‘General News’ in ‘Class’ Periodicals: The Gardeners’ Chronicle, 1841-1870″

Ali Hatapçı, University of Burgundy, Dijon

Ali is interested in print cultures and the history of natural history and is currently working on a monograph on the geographies of science and science publishing in provincial Britain.

    “For and/or About?: Victorian Print Trade Journals and the Shiftiness of Categorization”

    Jamie Horrocks, Associate Professor of English, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah

    Jamie’s current research focuses on letterpress design and design history in nineteenth-century England. She has published on Victorian typography, letterpress composition, print trade manuals and periodicals, as well as on other book history and design topics. 
      Cartoon engraving of a seated man reading the Lancet with another man looking over his shoulder

      “The Changing Publics of the Victorian Medical Journals”

      Sally Frampton,  Research Associate in Health Humanities, University of Oxford

      Sally’s current book project is a cultural history of first aid and lifesaving. She has previously published on medical and health journalism in the nineteenth century and on the history of surgical innovation.

        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.

        “Pick-A-Periodical” – Volume 9 of The Secular Chronicle

        Please join the RSVP Digital Events committee for our next “Pick-A-Periodical” with Clare Stainthorp* leading us on a discussion of the Secular Chronicle (1872–79)

        Date/time:  17 May at 8am PDT/ 10am CDT/ 11am EDT/ 4pm BST/ 5pm CEST

        Front Page of The Secular Chronicle vol. 9, 6 January 1878.

        Registration: as always, our events are free but registration is required to receive the zoom link

        The Secular Chronicle (1872–79), founded by  George H. Reddalls served atheist, agnostic, and freethinking audiences in Victorian Britain. Upon Reddalls’s death in 1875, Harriet Law took over as editor, promising principled atheism, republicanism, socialism, and the expression of her belief in the emancipation of women as fundamental to social progress. In 1877 the Secular Chronicle was notable for being the first freethought periodical to print large-scale front-page illustrations; it is a vital record of working-class radicalism and prompts reflection upon how minority groups used periodicals to build a sense of community, or counterpublic.

        Clare has asked that attendees browse volume 9 of the Secular Chronicle prior to the session, which can be found here. Questions to consider while browsing: What roles do different forms of content (illustrations, biographies,  essays, editorials, letters, jokes, poems, etc.) play? How does the form, structure, and content negotiate potential tensions between individual freedoms and aspirational community? How is the past, present, and future of the radical press (in terms of content, materialities, and distribution) conceptualised?

         *Clare Stainthorp is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at Queen Mary University of London. Her research currently focuses on the nineteenth-century freethought press. Most recently, she has published an article in Media History about what Chatterton’s Commune, the Atheistic Communistic Scorcher (1884–1895) can tell us about the affordances and limits of the periodical form, and an article in Victorian Periodicals Review about the role of dialogue and debate in freethought periodicals. Her monograph, Constance Naden: Scientist, Philosopher, Poet, was published by Peter Lang in 2019.

        Join us on May 17th

        As always, RSVP Digital Events are free and open to all. Register below to receive the Zoom link.

        Register Here