RSVP

The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals

RSVP News & Events

Congratulations to Our 2023 Curran Fellows

Above: George Cruikshank, “Our Library Table”, Ainsworth’s Magazine, 1842. Source: Granger Academic.

Our 2023 Curran Fellows have been chosen! RSVP received many strong proposals for this year’s Curran Fellowship competition. 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.

Join us in congratulating the successful applications of:

  • Abigail Farrier, “A Pioneer Editress”: Frieda Cassin’s Complex Contributions to the 19th Century Caribbean Creole Literary World
  • Abigail Clayton, Marginal Voices, Miscellaneous Fragments: Black Journalism and the Transatlantic Editing of Abolition, 1850–1860
  • Courteney Smith, “Most earnest in their endeavours to abate this evil”: Newspapers, the Contagious Diseases Acts, and the Creation of Moral Identities in Britain
  • Ellen Smith, Letters to the Editor: Uncovering ‘Ladies’ in Imperial Newspapers in the 1857 Indian Rebellion and Beyond
  • Marzena Kubisz, “In the service of the helpless”: (R)evolutions of Vegetarian Periodicals for Children 1893-1914
  • Sarah Pedersen, British Newspaper Coverage of Nordic Women’s Suffrage Campaigners and Women Politicians 1870-1914
  • Simon Young, Newspaper Notes and Queries: Local Print Communities in Victorian Britain and Ireland
  • Stephan Pigeon, Sub-Editorial Wages and Precarity in Journalism

Congratulations to all!

2023 Colby Scholarly Book Prize Winner Announced

The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals is delighted to announce the Winner of the
2023 Robert and Vineta Colby Scholarly Book Prize, awarded annually to the book,
published in the preceding year that most advances our understanding of the nineteenth-
century press.

The Colby Book Prize was endowed in 2006 in memory of Robert Colby by his wife, Vineta
Colby, both distinguished scholars and long-time members of RSVP. In 2011, following Vineta’s
death, the Board of Directors of RSVP unanimously voted to re-name the prize to honor
both Robert and Vineta Colby for their many fine contributions to the study of Victorian
periodicals and their long commitment to RSVP.

Our 2023 Winner of the Colby Scholarly Book Prize

Jennie Batchelor, for The Lady’s Magazine (1770-1832) and the Making of Literary History (Edinburgh University Press, 2022). The committee described Batchelor’s book as ‘compelling’, ‘bold’, ‘exciting’, and highly impactful for the discipline. The study is focused entirely on recovering the historical and literary importance of a major but understudied title. It displays considerable archival work, is meticulously researched, and offers a sophisticated argument that also manages to be powerfully and entertainingly written. Batchelor’s The Lady’s Magazine is a model of an extended case study that also makes an intervention in literary studies, with a reach that links communities of writers and readers from the end of the eighteenth century to well into the nineteenth century.

Honourable Mentions

In addition, the committee selected Matthew Wale’s Making Entomologists: How Periodicals
Shaped Scientific Communities in Nineteenth-Century Britain (University of Pittsburgh Press,
2022) for Honourable Mention. The committee praised Wale’s thorough and substantial
study of natural history periodicals, pointing out the thoughtful way in which material is
organised around four entomological modes of discourse. Archival work informs the strong
narrative thread running through the book, and the whole greatly increases our
understanding of the role of periodicals in the popular representation of science in the
nineteenth century.

The committee also shortlisted Andrew King, ed., Work and the Nineteenth-Century Press:
Living Work for Living People (epub, Routledge, 2022) commending its broad and deep
importance for Victorian periodical studies, its innovative organisation, and its combination
of weighty original research with some ambitious conceptual models.

Congratulations to all!

Subscribe to the RSVP Newsletter

Stay up-to-date with the latest research and exciting opportunities related to the fascinating world of Victorian periodicals with RSVP’s monthly newsletter.

As an international research society dedicated to the study of nineteenth-century newspapers and magazines, we’re proud to support and facilitate research on all aspects of Victorian periodicals.

Whether you’re a seasoned researcher or just starting to explore the world of Victorian media, our newsletter is an invaluable resource that will inform and inspire you.

All RSVP members are subscribers to the monthly newsletter. Become an RSVP member today and join our community of Victorian periodicals researchers!

Want to Get the Word Out?

Are you aware of any exciting event, academic, or professionalization opportunities that would interest RSVP members? Please contact our Communications Coordinator, Mary Grant, by the 6th of each month with any items for inclusion in the monthly RSVP Newsletter.

Image credit: ‘New Letter-Box, at Paris,’ Wood engraving, 1850. Courtesy of Granger Academic.

Need Help With Periodical Research?

RSVP Digital Events can help! Join us Friday, April 7 for our first “Collaborative Learning and Troubleshooting” workshop with Jiwon Min on “The Making and Unmaking of Krakatau: Reading Nineteenth Century Periodicals, the Volcano and Climate Change.” The workshop will take place Friday, April 7 at 8 a.m. PST / 11 a.m. EST / 4 p.m. GMT.

Front page of Krakatau Internationale Courant (22 Sept. 1883)

Jiwon will share international media coverage (newspapers and periodicals that relied on telegraphs and new underwater cables), weather observations and maps (that deployed a range of illustrative technologies), and other accounts in the periodical press. The Krakatau eruption and these reports fueled scientific investigations, as well as the literary imagination (Alfred Tennyson, Gerald Manley Hopkins, and M.P Shiel) and art (Frederick Edwin Church and William Ascroft). Jiwon brings these materials together and considers the role of the press in producing global ecological interconnectedness and a phenomenon called “weather weirding.”

Jiwon Min is a postdoctoral fellow in the English Department at University of Delaware. Her research interests are in nineteenth-century British literature and culture, Victorian ecologies, the Gothic, and climate change narratives in fiction and non-fiction.

Join us April 7

 RSVP digital events are free and open to the public. Complete the brief registration form below to receive the Zoom link.

Register Here

CFP: RSVP at MLA 2024

Special Session: Celebration and Commemoration in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals

The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP) seeks proposals for a special session at the 2024 Modern Language Convention in Philadelphia, in keeping with the presidential theme of Celebration: Joy and Sorrow. We welcome abstracts of 250-400 words on any aspect of celebration and/or commemoration within the nineteenth-century periodical press. Topics
might include:

  • Representations of celebrations and commemorations in nineteenth-century periodicals,
    including weddings, balls, holidays, memorials and funerals;
  • Royal celebrations and commemorations in the nineteenth-century press, including jubilees,
    coronations, royal birthdays, births of heirs, and funerals;
  • The food and drink of nineteenth-century celebrations and commemorations as they appear
    in the press, including menus, recipes, pubs, picnics, and restaurants;
  • Nineteenth-century domestic ideology in the press and celebration, commemoration, joy,
    and sorrow;
  • The celebration and commemoration of technical achievements (the railways, the
    transatlantic cable, etc) in the press;
  • Joy, humor, pleasure, comedy, slapstick, and humor in the nineteenth-century press;
  • Sorrow, melancholy, grief, and mourning in the nineteenth-century press;
  • Celebrations and commemorations within nineteenth-century serial fiction;
  • The design, contents, and rhetoric of special or commemorative issues;
  • Christmas special issues and supplements;
  • The visual rhetoric and technology of the nineteenth-century press as applied to celebrations,
    commemorations, joy, and sorrow (page design, illustration, photography);
  • Celebrations and commemoration among communities of publishers, editors, writers,
    printers, and others who produced periodicals (the Punch Brotherhood and others);
  • Celebrations and commemorative events within periodical studies.

Send Your Proposal In by March 13, 2023

Please send abstracts and a 1-page C.V. to Natalie Houston by March 13, 2023. Applicants do not need to be members of RSVP to submit. Authors of
accepted papers must be (or become) members of MLA by April 7.

Want to Learn About the Indian Punch?

Cover page of Avadh Punch 1878
Cover page of Avadh Punch, 1878. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

RSVP’s Digital Events committee is pleased to welcome Maryam Sikander for our next virtual event. As the inaugural presenter in our Speaker’s Forum series, Maryam will deliver a talk titled “Avadh Punch (1877-1938): Transformation of Colonial Text and Context” on Wednesday, March 1 at 8 a.m. PST / 11 a.m. EST / 4 p.m. GMT / 9:30 p.m. IST.

Maryam Sikander is a Junior Fellow at Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi. She was awarded our 2021 Sally Mitchell Dissertation Prize for her PhD thesis which she completed at SOAS University of London in 2021. Her thesis explored the relationship between the Victorian magazine Punch and its Indian rendition Avadh Punch. Previously, she has also been awarded a Curran Fellowship by RSVP to further her research on Anglo-Indian Punches.

Join Us March 1

As always, RSVP digital events are free and open to the public. Complete the brief registration form below to receive the Zoom link.

Register Now