On May 19-20, 2022, the Research Society for American Periodicals will be holding its annual meeting online. As part of the program, we invite brief proposals for two-minute lightning talks on pedagogy, digital projects, archival collections, or any other developments related to the study of serials and periodicals in the Americas.

Rather than delving deep into any particular topic, we envision these lightning talks as a chance to raise awareness of new ideas, resources, and opportunities for collaboration in the field. While not required, we especially encourage folks to bring something concrete to share: a lesson plan, an assignment, a project website, an archival collection, or any of the many other kinds of vehicles for our research and teaching today. 

To be considered, please submit a title, a 50-100 word description of the proposed lightning talk, and a brief CV via email to Chris LaCasse (Christopher.J.LaCasse@uscga.edu) by May 13, 2022. 

RSAP Online – 2022

Lightning Talks

Lightning Talks are designed to build community, promote research, and inspire future collaborations.  Each talk is only two minutes in length, but we hope these brief overviews will bring awareness to new scholarship, archives, and resources that may support future work in periodical studies.  Immediately following our last speaker, we will host a social hour, during which these conversations and many others may continue. We sincerely hope this new feature of RSAP Online helps foster new partnerships!

Magdalena Zapędowska, Smith College, Lecturer in English Language and Literature, Smith College

“An 1862 Concert for the Weekly Anglo-African”

I want to highlight a moment of Black organizing during the early Civil War, whose story unfolds through several issues of the Weekly Anglo-African. In March 1862, editor Robert Hamilton organized a concert in New York to aid the newspaper and raise funds for a vocational school for Black youth. This event foregrounds connections among 19th-century Black institutions, the multiple roles Black editors took on to keep the newspaper running, and seriality as a vehicle for mobilizing readers as a live audience.

Sidonia Serafini, ACLS/Mellon Dissertation Completion Fellow, University of Georgia (sidonia.serafini@uga.edu) 

“Black (Agri)cultural Periodicals”

Often disregarded as unprogressive, the Hampton-Tuskegee model of industrial education offered an important periodical press platform for rural Black southern communities. The periodicals that emerged out of these Institutes, including Hampton’s Southern Workman (1872-1939) and Tuskegee’s Negro Farmer (1914-18), featured the voices of well-known intellectuals, such as George Washington Carver and Alice Dunbar-Nelson, as well as lesser-known everyday artists, such as farmer John W. Lemon and homemaker Mrs. C. J. Calloway. Reexamining such periodicals makes visible how rural Black southerners of the Jim Crow era reclaimed the land by positioning the natural world not as a site of violence but as a site of cultural vibrancy and communal strength, autonomy, and knowledge.

Cynthia Patterson, Associate Professor, University of South Florida

“The Negro Chautauqua Movement”

As scholars such as Andrew Rieser have noted, “By the turn of the [twentieth] century, Chautauqua had established itself as a crucible of the white public.” Although occasionally mentioning guest appearances by Booker T. Washington and others, most histories of the Chautauqua movement fail to mention the presence of non-white attendees, beyond the wait staff working behind the scenes. However, a vibrant “Negro Chautauqua” movement flourished from 1885 to 1925. Traces of this movement exist in digitized periodicals; however, a treasure trove of materials from sponsoring Black Baptist and A.M.E. church archives promises to reveal more about this important movement.

E. James West, Lecturer in US History, University of York

“Building the Black Press”

This project focuses on the Black press and the built environment – it explores why Black press buildings matter, their practical and symbolic function, and their importance as a physical extension of the Black press’ role as a “voice for the race.” This project is connected to the publication of my recent book A House for the Struggle, and I’m currently working on a follow-up book about the redevelopment/repurposing of Black media buildings in Chicago.

Samantha Donoso, The University of Texas at Arlington Department of English

“American Spanish Language Newspapers in the Archive: The Culture of Reprinting and the Impact on Female Representation”

In my lightning talk, I will describe my research using The University of Arizona Library Digital Collections periodical archive. This archive supports our understanding of the social, political, and domestic concerns of the Mexican population in the American Southwest. My original query was to explore El Fronterizo, a Spanish language newspaper from Tucson, Arizona, to uncover poetry by female authors, yet what I found was a collection of reprinted poetry which created a new set of questions regarding how gender was represented and how the culture of reprinting was used to promote a specific narrative.

Mary Feeney, The University of Arizona Libraries, Tucson, Arizona (mfeeney@arizona.edu) 

Melissa Jerome, University of Florida, George A. Smathers Libraries (mmespino@ufl.edu) 

Ana J. Krahmer, University of North Texas, Library Digital Newspaper Program

“A Sampling of Spanish-Language Historical Newspapers in Chronicling America”

Chronicling America, the digitized historical newspaper database sponsored by the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities, now includes over sixty Spanish-language newspapers published in eight states and one U.S. territory. The National Digital Newspaper Program awardees in Arizona, Florida, and Texas have contributed about a third of these titles. We will highlight a few Spanish-language newspapers from our states that offer a glimpse of Latinx/Hispanic communities and provide unique perspectives on international events.

Katherine Poland and William A. Schlaack, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

The Illinois Digital Newspaper Collections (IDNC, https://idnc.library.illinois.edu/) are home to dozens of digitized newspapers representing a diverse range of groups from across the state. As the result of a partnership with JSTOR’s project “Documenting White Supremacy and its Opponents in the 1920s,” UIUC assisted with the digitization of two Klan-related newspapers. The prospect of putting these on IDNC proved concerning to Library staff. As a result, we developed the Library’s first harmful content statement for a digital collection. This talk will briefly explore the why and how of writing such a statement.

Mark Noonan, Professor of English, New York City College of Technology (CUNY).

“City of Print: New York and the Periodical Press”As Director of the NEH funded summer institute (2015 and 2020), Mark will discuss the rich resources on the recently launched website, of City of Print, City of Print: New York and the Periodical Press

The RSAP offers the following CFPs for the ALA, May 2016:

CFP for “Digital Lacunae: What Are We Missing?” 

We invite proposals on the topic “Digital Lacunae” for the American Literature Association Conference, San Francisco, California, May 26-29, 2016 (http://alaconf.org/). This roundtable will be sponsored by the Research Society for American Periodicals.

As digital repositories have become standard sites for researching and teaching American periodicals, the seduction of countless available texts and improved digital tools seem to be luring us into mistaking these resources as comprehensive. But what are we missing? We would like to hear proposals for papers that discuss texts that are not included in digital collections (or are only inadequately represented) or on how digital tools and methods distort the literary historical landscape.

For example, presenters might consider:

What gets “forgotten” when periodicals are not included for digitization?

What difference does it make that periodicals in regions like the Northeast are robustly favored in the necessary selection process, while those in the South are often suppressed and those in the Midwest are quietly discarded?

Which journals enjoy scholarly appeal thanks to better search engines and best digital practices?

How do subscription fees affect what we study?

What becomes of advertising in digital repositories and digital periodical scholarship?

Please email a 250-word abstract and contact information to Amanda Gailey (gailey@unl.edu) and Benjamin Fagan (bfagan434@gmail.com) by January 10, 2016.

CFP for “Woman Thinking” at ALA 2016

We welcome proposals on the topic “Woman Thinking: Public Intellectualism in U.S. Periodical Culture” for the American Literature Association Conference, San Francisco, CA, May 26-29, 2016 (http://alaconf.org/). This panel will be co-sponsored by the Research Society for American Periodicals and author societies including the Lydia Maria Child Society, the Anna Julia Cooper Society, the Catharine Maria Sedgwick Society, the Edwidge Danticat Society, the Margaret Fuller Society, the Society for Rebecca Harding Davis and Her World, the Emily Dickinson International Society, and the Elizabeth Oakes Smith Society.

 Historically, women have been excluded from the markers of intellectualism available to men, ranging from the academy to the church to the state. American periodical culture provided an alternative forum for women thinkers to participate in intellectual exchange and, in so doing, influence public opinion, critique societal practices, and advance human knowledge and freedom. While illuminating studies have linked women’s periodical work to their activism, less attention has been paid to the ways that women have engaged with periodical culture to establish themselves as intellectual authorities in the public mind. For this panel, we seek papers that explore the relationship between women’s periodical work and public intellectualism in America. We wish to emphasize that we look for papers on all women working and writing in periodicals, including those without author societies, such as Frances E.W. Harper, Ida B. Wells, Zitkala-Ša, Sarah Winnemucca, Sarah Josepha Hale, Fanny Fern, Grace Greenwood, etc.

In “The American Scholar,” Ralph Waldo Emerson described the ideal citizen as “Man Thinking.” How did women use periodicals to assert themselves as citizen-thinkers in their own right? How did this work against or in conjunction with women’s societal roles (domestic or otherwise) and how might this relate to the expanding boundaries of the positions of women and intellectuals in American society? How wide of a public does a woman need to address to be considered a public intellectual—local, regional, national, global? What types of literacy/writing may define women as intellectuals? In the case of editing, women often worked with an invisible hand, performing intellectual labor as feminized “carework.” How might such work be made visible to literary historians, and how might we think about editing as a way for women to enter public, intellectual discourse? As recent discussions in news and social media outlets have made clear, women of color have faced and continue to face distinctive exclusions from public intellectualism (consider the debate surrounding Melissa Harris-Perry as a public intellectual, for example). How have women of color established their own traditions of public intellectualism through periodical work? What do we have to gain by examining women’s periodical work through the lens of public intellectualism and what might we lose?

Please send 250-word abstracts and a brief biographical statement to Sarah Olivier at Sarah.Olivier@du.edu and Jean Lee Cole at jlcole@loyola.edu by January 10, 2016.

RSAP seeks proposals for the American Literature Association’s 25th Annual Conference, 22-25 May 2014 at the Hyatt Regency Washington on Capitol Hill, in Washington, D.C. Proposals are requested for the following:

1. War and/in American Periodicals after 1914

As spaces of dialogue and dissent, American periodicals have played a formative role in the negotiation of war’s meaning in American culture. This panel seeks 15-20–minute papers that might address any aspect of this topic, including but not limited to: seriality and war; soldier newspapers; trench journalism; periodicals and the home front; fictional representations of war in periodicals; periodicals as spaces for dialogue and dissent about war; anti-war publications; responses to war in black periodicals; war in visual culture; the imagined communities of wartime America; literary style and war correspondence; etc. Please email 300-word abstract and C.V. to Amanda Gailey at gailey [at] unl.edu by December 15, 2013; please put “RSAP panel submission” in the subject line.

2. “Graphic Humor in American Periodicals”

Abstracts (300 words max.) are encouraged on subjects addressing “graphic humor” in American periodicals.  Subjects could range from cartoon strips to political cartoons to illustrations, and may include alternative interpretations of the term “graphic.”  Papers should focus on the periodical context of the subject, as well as broader concerns of interpreting humor. This panel is co-sponsored by the American Humor Studies Association and the Research Society for American Periodicals. Please e-mail abstracts no later than January 10, 2013 to Tracy Wuster (wustert [at] gmail.com) with the subject line: “AHSA/RSAP session, 2013 ALA.”

Notifications will go out no later than January 20, 2013.

RSAP gave out prizes and also hosted two great panels, a roundtable on research opportunities and challenges presented by this year’s ProQuest/RSAP Article Prize winners, and another roundtable on “New Directions in African American Periodicals Research.” Check this space for CFPs for next year’s panels!

Plaque awarded to the winner of the biennial EBSCOhost Prize for Best Monograph on American Periodicals, Jared Gardner, for his book The Rise and Fall of Early American Magazine Culture (University of Illinois Press, 2012)