Candidates: 2019 Election for Officers and Directors (completed)

Standing for: 1. Vice-President / President-Elect (1-year term, by acclamation)

    • Jennifer Phegley
    • Name: Jennifer Phegley
    • Candidate Statement:

      I joined RSVP in 1997 when I attended what would be a career-changing conference in Chicago. Several of the warm and welcoming members I met became mentors who guided me from afar throughout my PhD and beyond. My involvement in the society has made possible my monographs Educating the Proper Woman Reader: Victorian Family Literary Magazines and the Cultural Health of the Nation and Courtship and Marriage in Victorian England. The organization has also supported my current project Magazine Mavericks: Marital Collaborations and the Invention of New Reading Audiences in Mid-Victorian England, for which I have been awarded a Curran Fellowship, a Harry Ransom Center Fellowship, and an NEH Summer Stipend. RSVP has always felt like my true academic home and I would be honored to serve as Vice-President for such a vibrant group of periodical scholars.

Standing for: 2. Treasurer (3-year term, by acclamation)

    • Iain Crawford
    • Name: Iain Crawford
    • Candidate Statement:

      I have served as RSVP Treasurer since 2013, my first term beginning as the Society was about to receive Eileen’s Curran bequest. In the past six years, I have been deeply involved in the transformation in RSVP’s activities made possible by the Curran gift, working with successive Presidents and the Board towards the transition into a Private Foundation that is now (almost) complete. In accepting the nomination to serve for a new three-year term, I hope to complete that transition, work with the Finance Committee to implement an annual budget planning process, and help ensure our professional services support fully meets the Society’s needs. Finally, believing that succession planning is an essential part of leadership, I hope we can identify the next holder of this position and that I can work with him/her to ensure a smooth and successful transition for a role that has grown enormously in scope and complexity since I first came into it.

Standing for: 3. Recording Secretary (2-year term, by acclamation)

    • April Patrick
    • Name: April Patrick
    • Candidate Statement:

      I first came to RSVP at the Roehampton conference in 2008 as a first-year doctoral student. Since then, I have participated in RSVP from the place of graduate student, independent scholar, and faculty member and have been shaped by this group more than any other. I have enjoyed serving on the RSVP Board for the past two years and welcome the opportunity to serve the community as Recording Secretary. I have taken minutes for board meetings on several occasions and quite enjoy the process of documenting the contributions of our many wonderful colleagues in this time of organizational change.

Standing for: 4. Board of Directors (four 2-year positions, one 1-year)

    • Anne DeWitt
    • Name: Anne DeWitt
    • Candidate Statement:

      Anne DeWitt's research interests include science in Victorian periodicals, religion, readers, and reviewing. She is a Clinical Associate Professor at New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Study and is the author of Moral Authority, Men of Science, and the Victorian Novel (Cambridge, 2013). While periodicals were important to this book, they are even more central to her two ongoing projects: a reception history of best-selling religious fiction in the 1880s, and a study of periodical poetry about evolution. She has regularly attended RSVP since 2008. This would be her second term on the RSVP Board.

    • Paul Fyfe
    • Name: Paul Fyfe
    • Candidate Statement:

      I am an associate professor in the English Department at North Carolina State University where my research and teaching compasses British Victorian literature, comparative media studies, and digital humanities. I count RSVP among my most formative scholarly communities, admiring especially its support of graduate student work as well as the pathbreaking grants which are changing the field of nineteenth-century studies. I have previously served on the board of RSVP, directed the Field Development Grant competition, and presented the Michael Wolff lecture, and would be pleased to continue supporting the organization as a board member.

    • Helena Goodwyn
    • Name: Helena Goodwyn
    • Candidate Statement:

      Dr Helena Goodwyn is a Lecturer at the University of St Andrews. Her primary research area is the nineteenth-century periodical press. Her monograph The Americanization of W. T. Stead is forthcoming with EUP. In 2014, with the support of then President Professor Joanne Shattock, Helena set up and undertook the role of Postgraduate Representative for RSVP. During her tenure she launched a blog to showcase postgraduate research. Since then she has been Webmaster for the society, and a panel judge for various prizes including: the VanArsdel, the Colby, and the Gale Fellowship. She also took part in the recent governance review as part of a sub-committee. She hopes to continue to serve the important work of the Society.

    • Alison Hedley
    • Name: Alison Hedley
    • Candidate Statement:

      I am a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at McGill University .txtLAB and Editor, The Yellow Nineties Personography, Ryerson University Centre for Digital Humanities. I welcome the opportunity to serve my research community as a member of the board for RSVP. As a postdoctoral scholar, I would prioritize advocacy for student, early-career and institutionally precarious RSVP members if I was elected to the board. I would strive to foster and expand the excellent opportunities RSVP already offers to student, early-career, and precarious scholars for research support and community participation. I would also give full consideration to the needs and priorities of members in these demographics in offering input on board decisions and processes.

    • Mary Elizabeth Leighton
    • Name: Mary Elizabeth Leighton
    • Candidate Statement:

      Mary Elizabeth Leighton is associate professor of English at the University of Victoria, co-organizer of the 2018 RSVP-VSAWC conference in Victoria, and a longtime RSVP member who was honoured to co-present the 2019 Michael Wolff lecture in Brighton. Her fascination with Victorian periodicals has continued from her 2001 VPR article on the medical press to her co-authored book, The Plot Thickens: Reading Illustrated Victorian Serial Fiction from Dickens to Du Maurier (Ohio UP, 2019). She would be delighted to bring her experiences as past president (2012-15) of VSAWC, past co-editor of Victorian Review, and conference co-organizer to the RSVP executive.

    • Kristine Moruzi
    • Name: Kristine Moruzi
    • Candidate Statement:

      Kristine Moruzi is a senior lecturer in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University, Australia. Her research areas include children’s print culture in the nineteenth century. Her first monograph, Constructing Girlhood through the Periodical Press, 1850-1915, was shortlisted for the Colby Book Prize. She has published on Victorian children’s periodicals in Victorian Periodicals Review and Children’s Literature Association Quarterly as well as in (selected) book chapters in Women, Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1830s-1900s (Edinburgh 2019) and The Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals and Newspapers (Routledge 2016). Her current project is on charity in nineteenth-century children’s periodicals.

    • James Mussell
    • Name: James Mussell
    • Candidate Statement:

      Like many of us, I consider RSVP to be my intellectual home and I’ve held a number of positions over the years. I served as Webmaster 2008- 2013, leading a project to redesign the site in 2013-2014. I served on the Board of Directors from 2013-2017 and have been a member of the Planning Committee since 2015. I regularly contribute to the Society’s other committees, including the Colby Prize, Gale Dissertation Award, and Field Development Grant. After some time away, I’m keen to rejoin the Board of Directors and so play a fuller role in the Society again.

    • Beth Palmer
    • Name: Beth Palmer
    • Candidate Statement:

      I have been a member of RSVP for over a decade and have been working on periodical culture in the nineteenth century from my PhD onwards. I have particular interests in editorship, women’s magazines, theatrical magazines and serialised fiction. I wrote several entries for the Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism and the entry on ‘Prose’ for the Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals and Newspapers. I would be interested to form part of the board under the new constitution and to give some time and energy back to the organisation from which I have benefitted greatly.

    • Leslee Thorne-Murphy
    • Name: Leslee Thorne-Murphy
    • Candidate Statement:

      I’m pleased to accept a nomination, and, if elected, would look forward to serving within an organization that I’ve valued greatly for rigorous academic engagement combined with very warm collegiality. My current work in periodical studies involves re-envisioning literary realism through short-run philanthropic journals and tracing the development of short fiction in the periodical market. My students have been valued collaborators in this work; they edit a digital anthology titled The Victorian Short Fiction Project. I teach in the Department of English and serve as associate dean in the College of Humanities at Brigham Young University.