Endnotes

2014 Robert and Vineta Colby Scholarly Book Prize

We are 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 annually to the scholarly book that most advances 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 models of transnational and transatlantic traffic in ideas, people, and publications, as well as its careful contextualization of a pair of periodical case studies. Written in engaging prose and beautifully illustrated, Bressey’s book makes original and powerful use of two micro-histories to address a big-picture issue—nineteenth-century anti-racial activism in and beyond Britain and the United States. The committee noted the multiple ways that ideas of geography shape the structure and inform the discourse of the book. They also praised its attentiveness to both periodical communities and the social networks that supported them.

The committee awarded an honorable mention 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 Hewitt’s wonderfully researched study for its meticulous documentation of the changes and challenges wrought by the repeal of the taxes on knowledge at mid-century. We offer our congratulations to both Caroline Bressey and Martin Hewitt for their important studies!

Gale Dissertation Research Fellowship in Nineteenth-Century Media

We are pleased to announce that the winner of the 2015 Gale Dissertation Research Fellowship in Nineteenth-Century Media is Linda Friday, a doctoral student at Edge Hill University. We offer her our warmest congratulations! In her project, “London in Fin-de-siècle Gothic fiction: Location-Specific Narrative, Print Culture and the Spatial Turn,” Linda identifies recurring London locales in late Victorian Gothic texts and examines their contemporary significance through an analysis of digitized newsprint. The project aims to discover new ways of reading late Victorian fiction by bringing to light ephemeral nuances from the period in which the novels were written. For example, Linda has discovered that Purfleet, the location of Count Dracula’s first London house, was the site of widely reported but now forgotten scandals in the years preceding publication of the novel. She argues that these events, which are now lost to us, would have been fresh in the minds of the novel’s contemporary readers. The material Linda is uncovering in the digital archives thus has the power to unsettle the ways in which well-known novels are studied and understood. The project therefore opens up new methodological possibilities for studying literary texts and spaces, highlighting the enormous research potential of the digital archive. In her research, Linda combines statistical analysis and “distant reading” of the digital archive with selective close reading of individual articles. Her intertextual approach demonstrates the crucial role of the press in shaping the meaning and significance of location in popular literature.

The Gale Dissertation Research Fellowship in Nineteenth-Century Media is awarded in support of dissertation research that will make the most substantial and innovative use of full-text digitized collections of nineteenth-century magazines and newspapers. The fellowship is made possible by the generosity of Gale, part of Cengage Learning. Winners of the fellowship receive a prize of $1,500 and a one-year subscription to selected digital collections from Gale, including Nineteenth-Century UK Periodicals and Nineteenth-Century British Library Newspapers. The deadline for the 2016 fellowship competition is January 15, 2016. A call for submissions will be posted on the RSVP website.

Curran Fellowship for Research on the Victorian Press

The Curran Fellowship is made possible through the generosity of pioneering scholar Eileen Curran. Last year, five prizes of $4,000 were awarded. These awards are intended to aid scholars studying nineteenth-century British magazines and newspapers in making use of primary print and archival sources. The projected research may involve study of the periodical press in any of its manifold forms and may range from within Britain itself...