Candidates: Click Here to Access the 2020 RSVP Election for Board of Directors and Vice-President
Standing for: 1. Click Here to View Bios and Vote for Vice-President/President Elect (two year term)
- Fionnuala Dillane
- Name: Fionnuala Dillane
- Candidate Statement:
Dear RSVP Colleagues,
I am delighted to have been nominated for consideration this role because I love this scholarly community and respect greatly the work that it does. My first conference as a graduate student was the RSVP Victorian Encounters meeting in London 20 years ago. I knew nobody. The field of periodical studies was entirely new to me. The experience was transformative and so positive: friendly, intellectual, interested, supportive, hospitable, generative. Those keynotes have never changed. I have tried to give back through my work on various committees, judging panels (Curran; VanArsdal; Colby) and as a member of the Board of Directors (2015-17). I would now appreciate the opportunity to do more, to support Jennifer for the next two years, to continue the work from the assured place the organisation has arrived at in this currently chaotic world, to address the new challenges ahead, sounding those keynotes to ensure colleagues from around the world find their welcome and keep our conversations moving with their work.
For any details on my administrative experience, teaching and research, they can be found here: https://people.ucd.ie/fionnuala.dillane
With thanks,
Fionnuala
Dr Fionnuala Dillane
Associate Prof Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
School of English, Drama, Film
University College Dublin
Belfield, Dublin 4.
Email: Fionnuala.Dillane@ucd.ie
- Kathryn Ledbetter
- Name: Kathryn Ledbetter
- Candidate Statement:
My first RSVP conference was in 1993 in Ann Arbor. RSVP has been a consistent source of scholarly inspiration ever since meeting Sally Mitchell and Linda Hughes in the hallways of that conference. I served as treasurer and editor of VPR for 7 years (2004-2011). During my term as editor, I helped to negotiate and coordinate production of digital publication of VPR with JSTOR and MUSE, and I assisted Patrick Leary in initiating and facilitating a change in publishers from University of Toronto Press to Johns Hopkins University Press. I have served the board in various committees, including conference program chair (2011, Canterbury) and the Robert L. Colby Book Prize Committee. I organized the RSVP conference in Austin, TX in 2012. I am also a recipient of RSVP’s Robert L. Colby Scholarly Book Prize and a Curran Fellowship. I am Professor of English at Texas State University in San Marcos, TX. My publications include British Victorian Women’s Periodicals: Civilization, Beauty, and Poetry, Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals: Commodities in Context, and articles or chapters on women and women’s periodicals.
- Catherine Waters
- Name: Catherine Waters
- Candidate Statement:
Waters is Professor of Victorian Literature and Print Culture at the University of Kent. She has been a member of RSVP since 2000. In 2009, she won the Robert and Vineta Colby Prize for her monograph, Commodity Culture in Dickens’s Household Words: The Social Life of Goods (Ashgate, 2008) and became a member of the Editorial Board of Victorian Periodicals Review in the same year. She served on the judging panel of the 2013 Rosemary VanArsdel Prize, as a Director on the Board from 2017-19, and chaired the governance review sub-committee on ‘Committees’ in 2018-19. Her most recent monograph, Special Correspondence and the Newspaper Press in Victorian Print Culture, 1850–1886, based upon research from her AHRC-funded project investigating of the writing of the Victorian ‘special correspondent’, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2019. With Ruth Brimacombe, she has also curated an online exhibition from this project, Picturing the News: The Art of Victorian Graphic Journalism. She is the author of various essays on Dickens, Sala and Victorian print culture.
Standing for: 2. Click Here to View Bios and Vote for the Board of Directors (four two-year terms)
- Troy Bassett
- Name: Troy Bassett
- Candidate Statement:
Bassett is a professor of English at Purdue University Fort Wayne. He is the general editor and creator of the digital humanities project At the Circulating Library: A Database of Victorian Fiction, 1837–1901 and the author of the monograph The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Three-Volume Novel (2020). Both works benefited from a Curran Fellowship (2014) that funded research into fiction serialization. A member of RSVP for over a decade, he has served as a member of the board of directors (2018–20), judge for the Colby Book Prize (2017), member of the conference committee for the Brighton conference (2019), and judge for the Field Development Grant (2020).
- Clare Clark
- Name: Clare Clark
- Candidate Statement:
I am Assistant Professor of Nineteenth Century Literature in the School of English at Trinity College Dublin, the top-ranked university department in Ireland and one of the top departments in Europe. I have previously served upon and chaired the Colby Prize committee (in 2018 and 2019, respectively) and am a regular attendee at RSVP conferences. My research focuses on crime writing and reportage published in late-Victorian newspapers. My second monograph, British Detective Fiction: The Successors to Sherlock Holmes (2020), builds upon Stephen Knight's assertion that C19th newspapers and periodicals are where detectives first appeared. It therefore focuses on six case studies of little-studied detective series that were published in a range of ephemeral formats, from illustrated magazines to provincial newspapers. I am currently working on an article (hopefully for VPR!) focusing on dark tourism reportage in the wake of the 1888 Ripper murders.
- Jesse Erickson
- Name: Jesse Erickson
- Candidate Statement:
Although I am new to the RSVP, I have previously served on the Board of Trustees for the American Printing History Association as the Vice President of Programs. Moreover, I currently serve on the editorial board for the journal Publishing History as well as for the University of Delaware Press—a position I have held for three years. As a bibliographic scholar, one of my primary research interests focuses on the print and publishing history of Victorian period author Ouida (b. Maria Louise Ramé, 1839-1908). Over the past two years, I have published and lectured extensively on this author including the article “Ouida Illustrated: Commerce, Politics, and Representation in the Illustrated Editions of Ouida’s Works,” published in the Spring 2019 issue of The Book Club of California Quarterly, and such lectures as “A Different Kind of Reading: Victorian Popular Afterlives,” a Charles W. Mann Jr. Lecture in the Book Arts delivered in March of 2019, my George Parker Winship Lecture, “Ouida Beyond Borders: Ethnicity in Publishers’ Design,” presented for the Houghton in April of 2019, “Re-imaginings: Bibliographical Futures for Victorian Pasts,” given at Temple University in October of 2019, and most recently, my paper “Across the Pond and Over the Color Line: Ouida in America’s Black Press,” which I presented virtually at the Victorian Popular Fiction Association’s 12th Annual Conference, Victorian Encounters and Environment.
- Lindsy Lawrence
- Name: Lindsy Lawrence
- Candidate Statement:
Lindsy Lawrence is Professor of English at the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith. She teaches a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses in nineteenth-century British literature with a focus on publication history and gender roles. She has recently published “‘Afford[ing] me a Place:’ Recovering the Poetry of Felicia Hemans, Caroline Bowles, Margaret Holford Hodson, Catherine Godwin, and Eliza Hamilton in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine” in The Edinburgh History of Victorian Women’s Print Media in Britain, 1830-1900 as well as a recent essay on “Doctor Who and the Neo-Victorian Christmas Serial Tradition” for Neo-Victorian Studies. In addition, she has published two recent articles on indexing poetry in nineteenth-century periodicals, including “Teaching Digital Literacy through Indexing Poetry in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals for the Periodical Poetry Index” for Journal of Victorian Culture Digital Forum. She also published on Elizabeth Gaskell, Downton Abbey, and critical empathetic writing pedagogy. She is Co-Director of the Periodical Poetry Index, a bibliographic database which indexes original poetry and poetry in translation published in nineteenth-century periodicals. She is a recipient of the 2019 Lucille Speakman Travel Award as well as the 2015 UAFS Research Award. She has been a member of RSVP since 2010, presenting conference papers at most of the annual conferences since then. She has also served as a reviewer for VPR as well as on one of the subcommittees for the RSVP bylaws review.
- 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 serve on the board and to give some time and energy back to the organisation from which I have benefitted greatly (including as a recipient of the Curran fellowship).
- Karen Steele
- Name: Karen Steele
- Candidate Statement:
Steele is professor of English at Texas Christian University. A feminist media historian of 19th and 20thcentury Ireland, she is the author of Women, Press, and Politics during the Irish Revival (Syracuse UP, 2007); co-editor, with Michael de Nie, of Ireland and the New Journalism (Palgrave, 2014) and editor of Maud Gonne’s Irish Nationalist Writings (Irish Academic P, 2003). She has published two articles in VPR and serves as an external reviewer for the journal.