RSVP

The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals

RSVP News & Events

The Future of Periodical Studies

Detail from “Some New Women in Unusual Fields of Activity,” Daily Inter Ocean 24, no. 63 (May 26, 1895): 30. Image courtesy of Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers archive.

Please join us on April 12, 8 a.m. PST / 11 a.m. EST / 4 p.m. GMT / 5 p.m. CET for our next RSVP Digital Event, “The Future of Periodical Studies: A Conversation with the Current and Former Editors of VPR,” the first in a series of reflection on the almost-60 years of RSVP.

Three editors of Victorian Periodicals Review look back at the last two decades of scholarship and offer their perspectives on how our field has developed, including borders new and old, territories still unmapped, routes opened, roads not taken, and predictions for the next generation.

Our speakers are: Kathryn Ledbetter (editor 2007-2012), Alexis Easley (2012-2018), and current editor Katherine Malone, with Leslie Howsam as moderator.

Join us April 12

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

Register Here

Let’s Begin Women’s History Month with a…Punch!

In the run-up to International Women’s Day 2024 (March 8), Dr. Clare Horrocks, along with Emily Parsons (LJMU Archivist and Special Collections Librarian) and Anne Foulkes (Digital Content Creator), will discuss the Women of Punch Exhibition held at Liverpool John Moores’ University Special Collections and Archives.

Inspired by the Curran Index and author-attribution projects (as discussed at a recent RSVP Digital Event), Dr. Horrocks has, since 2014, been building a digital exhibition space to showcase the women contributors of Punch. At this talk, Dr. Horrocks and associates will take us through the Exhibition, reflecting on the processes used to curate it, and opportunities to use the digital space to ‘pierce the curtain of anonymity’ (Simons, 2021).  The Women of Punch will be continually updated as colleagues and researchers make new discoveries about women identified.

Please join us from the unveiling of this ongoing project, one that is collaborative at its core for, as Dr. Horrocks and team describe it, only when ‘some descriptive matter can be attached to a name’ can we really start to understand the social and professional networks in which they operated (Simons, 2021). 

Join us next Friday, March 1!

We’ll convene at the normal time (8 a.m. PST / 11 a.m. EST / 4 p.m. FMT / 5 p.m. CET) and normal “space” (on Zoom). As always, RSVP Digital Events are free and open to the public, through registration is required to receive the Zoom link.

Register Here

More About the Project

Dr. Clare Horrocks is a Cultural Historian from Liverpool John Moores University, specialising in research on the Victorian periodical press, specifically Punch. Developing her collaboration with Gale Cengage and the transcription of the Punch Contributor Ledgers, she is now working with the editors of the Curran Index on a major project identifying the women contributors to the magazine. A series of events and publications are planned for 2024 to mark the tenth anniversary of Gale’s Punch Historical Archive being released. She has published widely on Punch and is a member of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals, also serving as a Submissions Editor for Victorian Periodicals Review.

Congratulations to our 2024 Curran Fellowship Winners!

We are happy to announce nine RSVP Curran Fellows for 2024. The projects on which the Curran Fellows are working demonstrate the ongoing expansion and development of our fields of inquiry and objects of study. We very much look forward to hearing more about their work. Congratulations to:

  • Chandrika Kaul for Imperialism, Nationalism and Cultures of Print: Mahatma Gandhi & the Periodical Press,1880s-1914
  • Chieko Ichikawa for “Woman’s Corner” in The Co-operative
    News: Finding a Female Network to Care and Share
  • Clare Burnett for “Degradation and Ruin”: The Construction of
    Public Opinion About Cannabis in British and Australian Periodicals 1880-1901
  • James Mussell for Cast as Required: The Introduction of Hot-Metal Composition in the Late Nineteenth Century
  • Katherine Hobbs for Margaret Oliphant and the Woman Question in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine
  • Kristine Moruzi for Literary Cultures in Children’s Periodicals
  • Preeshita Biswas for Circulating Inter-Imperial News: Mapping Imperial Affinities and Resistance in British Periodicals in Meiji Japan, 1860 to 1900
  • Sarah Ghasedi for Sophia Jex-Blake’s Anonymous Journalism
    and the Battle for Female Doctors in Nineteenth-Century Britain
  • Wanda Ieremia-Allan for O le Lamepa o le Pasefika – The Pacific Lantern

Ongoing Support for Periodicals Research

The 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. Made possible through the generosity of the late Eileen Curran, Professor Emerita of English, Colby College, and inspired by her pioneering research on Victorian periodicals, the Fellowships are awarded annually.

Exploring the 19thC with the HathiTrust Digital Library

Want to get the most out of using the HathiTrust Digital Library during your next research project? At RSVP’s next Digital Event, “‘On the dusty shelves of libraries’: Exploring the 19th-century with the HathiTrust Digital Library,” we will hear about HathiTrust’s resources, tools and services for computational analysis from John Walsh, Director of the HathiTrust Research Center and Associate Professor of Information and Library Science at Indiana University.

Join us on Zoom on February 16 at 8 a.m. PST / 11 a.m. EST / 4 p.m. GMT / 5 p.m. CET and learn more about how to make the most out of using the HathiTrust Digital Library!

Register Now to Receive the Zoom Link

As always, this event is free to all and open to the public. Join us on February 16!

Register Here

About Our Speaker

John’s research applies computational methods to the study of literary and historical documents. He is an editor of several digital scholarly editions, including:

Other research interests include comic books, especially formal, material, and bibliographic aspects of comics and the role of the reader and fan in comics and comic book culture; he developed Comic Book Markup Language (CBML) for scholarly encoding of comics and graphic novels.

For more about John’s projects, visit John’s website.

Join Us on January 19 to Discuss Transnational Feminism and the ‘New Indian Woman’

Your digital-neighborhood friends at RSVP’s Digital Events (Katy Birch, Sourav Chatterjee, Ali Hatapçi, Andrew Hobbs, and Priti Joshi) are happy to announce another year of talks, discussions, exchanges, and learning on all matters related to 19th-century periodicals of Britain and its empire.

Front page of newspaper, "The Woman's Signal," with header followed by three columns of text. A photograph of an Indian woman dominates the center column.

At our first event of 2024, we will hear about transnational feminism in periodicals from Tarini Bhamburkar in a talk entitled “Characterising the ‘New Indian Woman’: Indian Feminism and Indian Women’s Interviews in the Women’s Penny Paper and The Woman’s Signal.”

The talk will take place Friday, January 19 at 8 a.m. PST / 11 a.m. EST / 4 p.m. GMT / 5 p.m. CET.

Join Us Friday, January 19

Events are, as always, free and open to the public. Please register in advance to receive the Zoom link.

Register Here

About Our Speaker

Tarini Bhamburkar is a postgraduate researcher at the University of Bristol. She will be discussing how two Victorian feminist periodicals’ – the Women’s Penny Paper and The Woman’s Signal – coverage of the feminist activities of women in late Victorian India showcased an effort to inform British women of Indian women’s progress and also to embed the discourse of Indian women’s reform within British women’s own reform ideas.

The talk will also consider the representation and self-representation of two Indian women’s rights advocates – and the only racial minority – whose interviews were published in these periodicals, locating the analyses of these interviews in the context and perception of the ‘New Woman’ in both colony and metropole.

Tarini was also recently awarded VPR’s Expanding the Field prize. Congratulations, Tarini!

The Curran Index: Attribution and the Work of Historical Recovery in Periodicals Research

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

Register Here

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.