Endnotes

Graduate students are invited to submit essays for the 2009 VanArsdel Prize for the best graduate student essay on, about, or extensively using Victorian periodicals. Manuscripts should be 15–25 pages and should not have appeared in print. The winner receives a plaque, $300, and publication of the prize essay in VPR. Send paper submissions by mail before 1 April 2009 to Kathryn Ledbetter, Department of English, 601 University Drive, Texas State University, San Marcos, Texas 78666-4616. Please include a description of current status in graduate school.

The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals is very pleased to award the annual Robert Colby Scholarly Book Prize for a scholarly book that most advances the understanding of the nineteenth-century British newspaper and/or periodical press. All books exploring periodicals of the period are eligible (including single-author monographs, edited collections, and editions) as long as they have a publication date of 2009. The winner will receive a plaque and a monetary award of up to $3,000, and will be invited to speak at the RSVP conference next year. The prize was made possible by a generous gift by Vineta Colby in honor of Robert Colby, a long and devoted member of RSVP and a major scholar in the field of Victorian periodicals. For more information, please contact Kathryn Ledbetter, KLedbetter@txstate.edu.

The 41st Annual Conference of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals will be held 21–22 August 2009 at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis. While papers addressing any aspect of Victorian periodicals will be considered, RSVP particularly welcomes proposals for papers on the ways in which the newspaper and periodical press relied on a variety of networks, including journalistic, business, communication and technology, transportation, imperialist, immigration, political/activist, scientific, philosophical, literary, artistic, and other social networks. Other possible topics: gossip, celebrities, and blackmail; leisure clubs and societies; networks of influence; Transatlantic and transnational networks; family and kinship networks; networks of readers, writers, and publishers; sites of production, distribution, and syndication.

The program will also include a plenary speaker, a presentation by the winner of the 2008 Colby Scholarly Book Prize, and workshops devoted to digital resources and to methods of teaching periodicals. Pre-conference activities include the William Holman Hunt exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts. More information about the conference can be found at www.stthomas.edu/english/victorian or www.rs4vp.org.

RSVP will award grants covering the conference registration fee to three graduate students presenting papers. Graduate students who would like to be considered should include a cover letter explaining how the conference proposal fits into their long-term research plans as well as any other special considerations. Recipients will be notified in early spring of 2009.

Winners of the 2009 Curran Fellowship for Research on the Victorian Press

The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP) is pleased to announce the awarding of its first Curran Fellowship for research on the Victorian press. Made possible through the generosity of Eileen Curran, Emerita Professor of English at Colby College, these two grants of $2500 each are intended to assist scholars in making use of primary and archival sources for the study of nineteenth-century British magazines and newspapers.

The winners of the Curran Fellowship for research to be undertaken in 2009 are Sydney J. Shep, Senior Lecturer in Print and Book Culture at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, and Elizabeth Carolyn Miller, Assistant Professor of English at the University of California at Davis, USA. Dr. Shep's project, entitled "Typographical Journals & the Printers' Web: A Global Communication Network," will build upon her earlier work on the production and circulation of these trade periodicals by close examination of a London archive of scrapbooks, correspondence, and annotated journals. Dr. Miller's project, "The Birth of Slow Print: Literary Radicalism and Print Culture, 1880–1914," will involve inspection of the George Bernard Shaw archive and the holdings of late-Victorian radical periodicals at the British Library for insight into the workings of a radical press self-consciously at odds with mass print culture.

RSVP congratulates Drs. Shep and Miller, and thanks the many other scholars who...