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  • Endnotes

The 2017 Colby Book Prize

We are pleased to announce that the winner of this year's Robert and Vineta Colby Scholarly Book Prize is The Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals and Newspapers, co-edited by Andrew King, Alexis Easley, and John Morton. The prize committee, chaired by Kathryn Ledbetter, describes the book as a "standard reference work" that offers "cutting-edge, comprehensive scholarship by experts in each area." The volume, the committee notes, is "wide-ranging and diverse in ways that step beyond Great Britain to consider British newspapers and periodicals in relation to North American, European, Australian, and Asian publications." Congratulations to all of the scholars who contributed to the volume!

The Linda H. Peterson Fellowship

We are pleased to announce that the winner of the Linda H. Peterson Fellowship for 2018 is Ian Haywood, Professor of English at the University of Roehampton, UK, for his project, "The Rise of Victorian Caricature: Satirical Periodicals 1830–1850." The project abstract is as follows:

This project, which is designed to be a sequel to my last book Romanticism and Caricature (2013), will challenge the orthodox view that the Victorian period "tamed" caricature by depriving it of its political and aesthetic freedoms and subjecting it to the editorial control of the illustrated magazine, the [End Page 444] prime example being Punch. In Thackeray's words, caricature was "washed and combed" by Victorian propriety. The problem with this gentrification and domestication thesis, which assumes that visual satire became uniformly respectable in outlook and naturalistic in style, is that it is both inaccurate and misleading. I will argue that, on the contrary, a slew of now largely forgotten radical satirical periodicals of the 1830s and 1840s took political caricature in a more democratic direction than in its Georgian heyday. Far from neutering its effectiveness, the "periodicalization" of graphic satire brought text and image into closer contact than before and installed the large cut (the equivalent of the single-print caricature) as the dominant logo of a new political imagination in which topical events were instantly transformed into comic, bizarre, grotesque, and often violent scenes. The accessibility of these images, which appeared in periodicals costing just one penny, is testimony to the existence of a flourishing viewership for political caricature at precisely the moment when it allegedly disappeared.

Congratulations to Professor Haywood for receiving this prestigious award! The Linda H. Peterson Fellowship, named after the widely influential Yale professor and longtime RSVP board member and vice president, was created with funds from a generous bequest from the late Eileen Curran, a pioneering researcher and Emerita Professor of English at Colby College. The purpose of the Peterson Fellowship is to support one scholar full-time for four months to conduct a research project on the nineteenth-century British periodical and newspaper press. For more information, see http://rs4vp.org/peterson-fellowship.

Curran Fellowships for Research on the Victorian Press

Curran Fellowships are made possible through the generosity of pioneering scholar Eileen Curran. Last year, six prizes 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 to the many countries within and outside of the empire where British magazines and newspapers were bought, sold, and read during the long nineteenth century (ca. 1780–1914). The deadline for the 2017 Curran Fellowship competition will soon be announced. For more details, see http://rs4vp.org/curran-fellowship. [End Page 445]

RSVP Field Development Grant

The RSVP Field Development Grant was created with funds from a generous bequest from the late Eileen Curran, pioneering researcher and emerita professor of English at Colby College. The grant is intended to support a single scholar or a team of researchers in creating resources that will facilitate the work of other scholars in the study of nineteenth-century British newspapers and periodicals. For more information, see http://rs4vp.org/rsvp-field-development-grant.

Gale Dissertation Research Fellowship in Nineteenth-Century Media

The Gale Dissertation Research Fellowship in Nineteenth-Century Media is...

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