RSVP

The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals

RSVP News & Events

CFP: Multilingualism and Periodical Studies

Proposal for a Special Session at MLA 2022

In keeping with the MLA 2022 presidential theme of multilingualism, the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP) invites proposals for a special session on multilingualism in nineteenth-century periodicals and periodicals studies. How does periodicals studies confront monolingual biases or move beyond them? What research examples, collaborations, institutional conditions, or teaching practices facilitate or hinder multilingual periodicals scholarship and, by turn, the widening of nineteenth-century studies?

Submit 250-word abstracts to paul.fyfe@ncsu.edu by March 24, 2021. Applicants do not need to be RSVP members to submit — and feel encouraged to circulate this call to scholars and teachers in other fields.

Accepted panelists must be (or become) members of MLA and be able to attend the MLA convention in Washington, DC in January 2022.

Join Our Conversation on Teaching 19 March

Join us on 19 March 2021 at 5 pm UK / 1 pm EST for the next installment of our #RSVPDigitalSalon 2021 series, “Teaching With Nineteenth-Century Periodicals Online”! We’ll learn more about how to teach periodicals effectively online during a time when many have had to adapt their syllabi to distance learning. Our panelists and topics include:

Melissa H. Range, Using Digital Newspapers in Teaching Nineteenth Century African American Writers

Melissa Range is the author of two collections of poetry: Scriptorium, a winner of the 2015 National Poetry Series (Beacon Press, 2016), and Horse and Rider (Texas Tech University Press, 2010). Her third collection, in progress, is an archivally driven collection that examines the abolitionist movement in the nineteenth century United States. Range is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Originally from East Tennessee, she teaches creative writing and American literature at Lawrence University in Wisconsin.

Jennifer Phegley, Introducing Periodicals to Undergraduates: Serial Reading Blogs and Wiki Magazine Projects

Jennifer Phegley chairs the English Department at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. She is the author of Educating the Proper Woman Reader: Victorian Family Literary Magazines and the Cultural Health of the Nation and Courtship and Marriage in Victorian England as well as several edited collections and numerous articles on authorship, publishing, periodicals, and pedagogy. Her current project, Magazine Mavericks: Mary Elizabeth Braddon, John Maxwell, and the Emergence of New Readings Audiences in Mid-Victorian England, has been supported by a Harry Ransom Center Research Fellowship, a Curran Fellowship, and an NEH Summer Stipend. She started teaching online courses in 2010 and never looked back!

Lindsy Lawrence, Indexing Poetry in the Digital Classroom

Dr. Lindsy Lawrence is Professor of English at the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith. She has published work on Elizabeth Gaskell, serial poetry publication, and Neo-Victorian themes in contemporary television series such as Downton Abbey. Her recent publications include an article on women poets in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in Women, Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1830s-1900s: The Victorian Period (2019). She also published a recent article on the Victorian Christmas serial tradition in contemporary television and Doctor Who for the Journal of Neo-Victorian Studies. She teaches a variety of courses in composition, cultural studies, and eighteenth and nineteenth-century British literature with a focus on publication history, gender roles, and digital humanities. She is Co-Director of the Periodical Poetry Index.

James Mussell, “Mechanical exigencies” and the enabling difference: looking again at the look of the page

James Mussell is Associate Professor in Victorian Literature at the University of Leeds.  He is the author of Science, Time and Space in the Late Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press (2007) and The Nineteenth-Century Press in the Digital Age (2012).  He is one of the editors of the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018); and books on W.T. Stead (2012) and Oliver Lodge (2020).  He is currently working on a monograph, Whispers of Print, and an edited collection on letterpress printing.

Register Now

Register for this free online event here. Participation does not require RSVP membership and all are welcome to attend. If you have any questions about this event, please don’t hesitate to contact us and direct your inquiry to the Vice President.

Congratulations to Our Curran Award Winners!

RSVP is pleased to announce the following winners of this year’s Curran Fellowships! 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.

This year’s projects cover a fascinating array of topics, including a wide variety of transnational and interdisciplinary studies. Our winners for 2021 include:

  • Anne Anderson, Philistines versus Aesthetes: Punch’s Campaign Against Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetes
  • Brittany Carlson, (Re)mediating Math Anxieties with The Narrative, the Ephemeral, and the Visual, 1830-1940
  • Eoin Carter, Richard Carlile and Radical Print Culture (1815-43)
  • Eloise Forestier, The Victoria Press: A Transnational Platform of Periodical Editorship
  • Alan Guenther, Christian-Muslim Relations in Victorian Periodicals
  • Vaibhav Singh, Before the Revolution: Technology, Mechanization, and the Periodical Press in Colonial India
  • Francesca Strobino, Investigating William Henry Fox Talbot’s Experiments in Photomechanical Printing
  • Jessica Terekhov, The Life Cycle of the Part-Issued Victorian Novel

You can read more about the projects here.

Want to Apply for Next Year?

Inspired by and made possible through the generosity of the late Eileen Curran (Professor Emerita of English, Colby College), Curran Fellowships are awarded annually. Applications open in mid-November for the following year. While our funding cycle for this year is now closed, there’s always time to get started on next year’s applications! Learn more about the Curran Fellowship‘s history, application guidelines, and past winners on our website.

Join Our Grad Students for a Research Workshop

Part of the RSVP Digital Salon Series 2021

We warmly invite everyone to join us on Friday, February 26 2021 at 1 p.m. (EST) / 6 p.m. (UK) for our next #RSVPDigitalSalon event, Doing Periodical Research Online: A Graduate-Directed Workshop on Process and Practice! This online workshop is led by graduate students, for graduate students, and welcomes all scholars of the periodical press.

Discussions about our research often focus (understandably) on our methodologies. This workshop will turn to our processes and practices as researchers.

Graduate students will give brief responses to a series of “How to” questions, followed by an open discussion where audience contributions will be encouraged. We hope to share our practices, provide each other with practical insights, and generate a shareable list of tips, tricks, and resources as we continue to conduct much of our work online.

We’ll answer questions like “How do you:

  • Discover primary research materials?
  • Identify secondary materials?
  • Organize your sources and notes?
  • Write? (ideas, drafts, revision…)
  • Use particular tools or practices?
  • Fit your research into ongoing discussions?
  • Pivot when obstacles come up?

Register here for this free online event. Participation does not require RSVP membership; all are welcome.

Though this event is organized by graduate students in support of graduate students, supervisors and anyone interested in periodical research are also encouraged to attend!

For any queries about this event, please contact us and direct your enquiry to our Vice President.

 

 

Optional Readings for Friday’s Digital Salon Event

We want to remind everyone of our upcoming RSVP Digital Salon event, “A Discussion on Decolonizing Periodical Studies,” this Friday, January 22 at 1 p.m. (EST) / 6 p.m. (GMT)! Registration for the event is free and open to all who wish to attend. You can register for the event here.

Our three panelists — Dr. Caroline Bressey, Dr. Priti Joshi, and Dr. Candace Ward — will speak to one or more of the following questions:

  • How do we approach the archive/new readings of the digital archive?
  • What material are we not reading (that we should be) and where do we find it?
  • What new methodologies do we need to decolonize our research?
  • Should we/how should we reframe the questions we ask of periodicals?
  • How do we go about “undisciplining” periodical studies?
  • What questions should we be asking in addition to/instead of these?

This is intended to be more of an informal event, so we hope you will join the discussion as well!

Optional Readings

Though panelists will not be reading formal papers, for anyone interested in reading some of their work in advance, the following are recommended as start points:

  • Caroline Bressey, ‘Surfacing black and brown bodies in the digital archive: domestic workers in late nineteenth-century Australia’, Journal of Historical Geography 70 (2020): 1-11
  • Priti Joshi, “Scissors-and-Paste: Ephemerality and Memorialization in the Archive of Indian Newspapers” Amodern 7 (Dec. 2017), https://amodern.net/article/scissors-and-paste/
  • Candace Ward, ‘“An Engine of Immense Power”: The Jamaica Watchman and Crossings in Nineteenth-Century Colonial Print Culture’, Victorian Periodicals Review 51.3 (Fall 2018): 483-503

See Also:

  • Ronjaunee Chatterjee, Alicia Mireles Christoff, Amy R. Wong, ‘Introduction: Undisciplining Victorian Studies’, Victorian Studies, 62.3 (Spring 2020): 369-391

A fuller list of works by our discussion panelists can be found at:

Further Details About the Event

Dr. Lara Atkin will chair the discussion. For Dr. Atkin’s work see: https://www.kent.ac.uk/english/people/2704/www.kent.ac.uk/english/people/2704/atkin-lara 

If you have any questions, or difficulty accessing material, please email our Vice President, Fionnuala Dillane.

We look forward to seeing you on Friday!

Communications Coordinator Wanted – Applications due February 15

RSVP seeks applicants with excellent organizational and time management skills to assist with our daily operations as a Communications Coordinator. As the Communications Coordinator, your responsibilities would include:

  • Working with the President and Vice President to manage and update membership lists
  • Distributing the monthly newsletter
  • Assisting with digital event enrollment and administration
  • Supporting communications related to the annual conference, elections, and awards

The Communications Coordinator will receive a $5,000 stipend paid at regular intervals over the course of the appointment. Employment begins on March 1 and runs through December 31, 2021. The position is renewable for the following calendar year. Duties will average 5 hours per week (at $20 per hour for 250 maximum hours) but are expected to fluctuate.

How to Apply

We encourage candidates interested in supporting RSVP’s activities and goals to apply. Applications will be accepted through February 15, 2021. To apply, interested applicants should send the following materials to the RSVP president (president@rs4vp.org):

  • A 1-page cover letter explaining your interest in and qualifications for the job
  • The names and email addresses of two references (include these in your cover letter)
  • A 1-page c.v.

Graduate students and independent scholars are encouraged to apply. Current Officers and Directors of RSVP are not eligible. Contact us with any questions.