Early registration is now open for the Cultures of Communication conference taking place this 10-11 September in Edinburgh, with a reduced fee available until 31 July. A preliminary schedule of session times is up on the website, as is the registration page. See http://www.ccii.hss.ed.ac.uk/?page_id=37
RSVP News & Events
VanArsdel Graduate Student Essay Prize
The VanArsdel Prize is awarded annually to the best graduate student essay investigating Victorian periodicals and newspapers. The prize was established in 1990 to honour Rosemary VanArsdel, a founding member of RSVP whose groundbreaking research continues to shape the field of nineteenth-century periodical studies. The deadline for this year’s award competition is May 1, 2015. The winner will receive $500 and publication in the spring 2016 issue of Victorian Periodicals Review. Submissions should be 15-25 pages, excluding notes and bibliography. Manuscripts should not have appeared in print. For further details about the prize, contact the editor of VPR, Alexis Easley (maeasley@stthomas.edu).
ESPrit Conference CFP – Politics & Periodicals
Deadline now extended until 1st June 2015.
Full details available at http://www.espr-it.eu/news/2015-esprit-conference/25-call-for-papers
ESPRIT’s Newsletter is now available to download
2015 Robert and Vineta Colby Scholarly Book Prize – Winner Announced!
The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals is delighted to announce the winner of the 2014 Robert and Vineta Colby Scholarly Book Prize – Caroline Bressey, author of Empire, Race, and the Politics of Anti-Caste (Bloomsbury, 2014). The Colby Prize is awarded to the scholarly book that most advances the understanding of the nineteenth-century British newspaper or periodical press. The selection committee praised Caroline Bressey’s book as innovative and conceptually engaging, citing its challenge to metropolitan-centric modelings of transnational and trans-Atlantic traffic in ideas, people, and publications and its careful contextualization of a pair of periodical case-studies. In engaging prose, the beautifully illustrated book makes original and powerful use of two micro-histories to address a big-picture issue – 19th c. antiracial activism in and beyond Britain and the US. Noting the multiple ways that ideas of geography shape the structure and inform the discourse of the book, the committee singled out its attention not only to periodical communities but also to the social networks supporting these periodical communities.
The committee awarded an “honorable mention” this year to Martin Hewitt, author of The Dawn of the Cheap Press in Victorian Britain: The End of the ‘Taxes on Knowledge,’ 1849-1869. The committee praised Hewett’s wonderfully researched study for its meticulous documentation of “the changes and challenges wrought by the legacy of repeal” of taxes on knowledge in the mid century.
REMINDER: CFP deadline approaching for the Annual RSVP Conference
A reminder that the deadline for proposals for the annual conference of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals is February 1. RSVP welcomes proposals on any aspect of 19th-century magazines and newspapers, but the specific topic for the 2015 conference is “Life and Death in the 19th-Century Press.” The conference will be held in Ghent, Belgium, on July 10 and 11. For more information please visit our Conference News area of the website.