CFP: New Directions for Interdisciplinary Collaborations in Periodical Studies

The Research Society for American Periodicals invites submissions for a panel to be held at the American Literature Association conference in Chicago, May 26-29, 2022.

In their foundational 2006 essay, “The Rise of Periodical Studies,” Sean Latham and Robert Scholes argued that “periodical studies should be constructed as a collaborative scholarly enterprise that cannot be confined to one scholar or even a single discipline.” What collaborative scholarly enterprises are possible today? 

This panel seeks presentations that reflect or raise the full range of collaborations in periodical studies across disciplines, communities, and professions. From the robust community around digitization programs to the popularity of newspapers as research data for computer scientists, how can we take stock of new trends and reimagine the shape of periodicals scholarship? 

We invite proposals on any aspect of these conversations, including but not limited to: 

• What research coalitions with librarians and archivists might emerge around Chronicling America, the Digital Library of the Caribbean, or other landmark collections? 
• Given the preponderance of white-identifying periodicals in many of the largest collections, what interventions are needed to ensure fuller access and engagement with Black, Latinx, Native/Indigenous, multilingual, immigrant, or other minoritized periodical cultures?
• What research questions or projects might engage with computer scientists in areas such as data science, machine learning, or natural language processing? What can we learn from each other? What can we learn from periodical collections as data? 
• What are the trends in digital projects on periodicals? (see RSAP’s Digital Projects Open List: http://bit.ly/rsap-list)

Please submit a one-page abstract and a brief c.v. by January 10, 2021 to Jim Casey at jccasey AT psu DOT edu. Please use the subject line “RSAP/ALA proposal.” 

Prospective inquiries welcomed. We especially encourage proposals from collaborative teams, graduate students, contingent faculty, independent researchers, museum workers, computational researchers, archivists, librarians, and others within and beyond higher education. 

(Published an article in the last two years on periodicals? Please submit by Dec 15 for the RSAP Article Prize: http://www.periodicalresearch.org/rsap-article-prize-2020-21.)

City of Print: New York and the Periodical Press

(NEH SUMMER INSTITUTE)

(June 21 – July 3, 2020)

New York City College of Technology-CUNY will host a two-week NEH Summer Institute for college and university faculty in the summer of 2020 (June 21 – July 3).

For more information visit:

http://www.citytech.cuny.edu/cityofprint/

Applications to participate will be accepted via our online application system until March 1, 2020.

The Institute will focus on periodicals, place, and the history of publishing in New York.  As an institute participant, you will take part in discussions led by cultural historians, archivists, and experts in the fields of American literature, art and urban history, and periodical studies; participate in hands-on sessions in the periodicals collection of the New-York Historical Society; visit sites important to the rise of New York’s periodical press, such as Newspaper Row, Gramercy Park, the New York Seaport, the East Village, and the Algonquin Hotel; and attend Digital Humanities workshops.

You will also be asked to read a rich body of scholarship and consider new interdisciplinary approaches for researching and teaching periodicals that take into account the important site of their production, as well as relevant cultural, technological, aesthetic, and historical considerations. Sessions will be held across New York City including New York City College of Technology, the Brooklyn Historical Society, The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Pace University, and the New-York Historical Society.

We encourage applicants from any field who are interested in the subject matter. Scholars and teachers specializing in periodical studies, journalism, urban history, art history, American studies, literature, and/or cultural studies will find the Institute especially attractive.

Independent scholars, scholars engaged in museum work or full-time graduate studies are also urged to apply.

The Research Society for American Periodicals (RSAP) proudly announces its $1000 Book Prize

The prize will be awarded for the best monograph on American periodicals published by an academic press between January 1, 2017 and December 31, 2018. Books will be judged by a peer review of three scholars chosen by the RSAP Advisory Board.

The Book Prize will be awarded at the American Literature Association (ALA) conference in Boston, MA, May 23-26, 2019. The winner and up to two honorable mentions will be notified by March 1, 2019 and will be recognized at an RSAP-sponsored reception at ALA.

Applicants, who must be current members of RSAP when they submit their books, should download and submit a completed registration form and THREE hard copies of their work by December 15, 2018 to:

Mark Noonan

503 Namm Hall

Department of English

New York City College of Technology, CUNY

300 Jay Street

Brooklyn, NY 11201

Please direct any questions to Book Prize Committee Chair, Mark Noonan, at mnoonan@citytech.cuny.edu.

Here’s a list of papers and panels at ALA that are not sponsored by RSAP, but nevertheless of interest to periodicals scholars. Please contact us if you are presenting a paper that we should include in this list!

And be sure to check out RSAP-sponsored panels and events here.

Session 2-B      Reimagining Young Willa Cather: New Evidence, New Approaches 

1.         “Cather’s 1897 ‘Prize Question’ Contest for the National Stockman and Farmer: or, What ‘Our Young Folks’ Need to Know,” Timothy Bintrim, St. Francis University

Session 3-A      The Citizen Poets of Boston, 1789–1820 

1.         “Recovering the Citizen Poets of Boston: Pedagogy, Research, and Findings,” Paul Lewis, Boston College

2.         “Feminist Voices in the Citizen Poets Anthology,” Alexandra Mitropoulos, Boston College School of Law

3.         “Reprinting as Revision: The Version of Joseph Fawcett’s ‘Contrast’ (1798) that Appeared in

        the Christian Disciple in 1816,” Nicholas Volpe, Boston College

4.         “Local Forms, National Concerns: Populist Archives of Boston’s Early Republic,” Kristin Canfield, University of Texas at Austin

Session 4-D      Defining Genres in Early African American Literature 

1.         “Circulating the Black Rapist: Sketches of the Life of Joseph Mountain and Early American Networks of Print,” Brian Baaki, CUNY Graduate Center

2.         “At War with Genre: The Context and Construction of the Civil War in Julia C. Collins’s The Curse of Caste or; The Slave Bride,” Eric Van Hoose, University of Cincinnati

3.         “Anonymous Circulations: Unnamed Southern Correspondents for Freedom’s Journal and The Rights of All,” Gordon Fraser, University of Connecticut

4.         “The Place of the Conjurer: Genre, William Wells Brown, and the Conjure Tale,” Sarah Ingle, University of Virginia

Session 4-F      Issues of Celebrity 

3.         “Paul Gray, Time Magazine, and American Literary Culture in the Late Twentieth Century,” Frank Novak, Pepperdine University

Session 5-B      Emergence and Influence of Literary Criticism in Antebellum America 

1.         “Prison Reform and Interiority in Reviews of Antebellum American Fiction,” Carl Ostrowski, Middle Tennessee State University

2.         “Critical Fictions: Melville’s Pierre and Antebellum Critical Culture,” Adam Gordon, Whitman College

3.         “Cross-Racial Labor Reform: Literary Notices of Cheap Fiction in Frederick Douglass’ Paper,” Timothy Helwig, Western Illinois University

Session 5-O     Literary Business and Finance 

3.         “Advertising Black Entrepreneurial Uplift in The Crisis,” Adam Coombs, Indiana University

Session 7-E      Print Cultures within the Nation 

1.         “‘[C]haracteristic of the American Mind’: 19^th Century Humor, Satire, and National Identity,” Todd Nathan Thompson, Indiana University of Pennsylvania

2.         “‘The Honest, Home-Write Page’: The Search for the Early American Comic Strip,” Alex J. Beringer, University of Montevallo

3.         “Forming Community through Print: Bill Nye in the Pittsburg Dispatch,” Brianne Jaquette, University of Missouri

Session 8-C      Celebrating Twenty Years of the Woolson Society with New Perspectives on Her Life and Work 

2.         “Trial by Newspaper: Murder and Invention in Woolson’s Anne,” Kathleen Diffley, University of Iowa

Session 8-H      Ezra Pound Society, Session 2: New Trends in Ezra Pound Studies 

1.         “Ezra and Gino in the Indice, 1930-31,” Wayne Pounds, Aoyama Gakuin University, Tokyo, Japan

Session 9-G      Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore 

3.         “Marianne Moore in Transatlantic Modernist Magazines,” Celena E. Kusch, University of South Carolina Upstate

Session 10-B    Roundtable on Dreiser and Gender 2015: Flash Talks

3.         “‘The Realist and his/her Sources’: Gendered Authorship and Readership in Dreiser’s Late Literary Criticism,” Carol Smith, University of Winchester

Session 11-F    Comics and Modernism 

1.         “Cartoonists Greet the Future: Comics, the Armory Show, and the Shock of Recognition,” Peter R. Sattler, Lakeland College

2.         “The Invisibility of Influence: The Poetics of George Herriman’s Krazy Kat and the Comicity of E.E. Cummings,” Ben Novotny Owen, Ohio State University

3.         “Beyond Black: Abstraction and Expression in the Comics and Canvases of Ad Reinhardt,” David M. Ball, Princeton University

Session 11-G    Issues of Social Justice 

1.         “Shadow Mayors of Harlem: Umbra’s New York Avant-Garde,” Keith D. Leonard, American University

2.         “Re-Viewing Chinatown: Countering Anti-Chinese Stereotypes in the 1880s Illustrated Press,” Amanda Frisken, SUNY College at Old Westbury

4.         “Upton Sinclair’s Pulp Didacticism,” Andrew Smart, The Ohio State University

Session 15-A    Mark Twain’s Audiences: Reception Histories and Reconstructed Reading Communities 

1.         “Reconstructing the Reading Community of the Century: The Pre-Published Chapters of Huckleberry Finn,” Barbara Hochman, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

3.         “The Reception of The Prince and the Pauper in the Early 1880s,” James L. Machor, Kansas State University

Session 15-F    Crime, Mystery, and Detective Fiction 

1.         “‘Not Being A Female’: Singular Images of Female Criminals in the Antebellum Press,” Nicole C. Livengood, Marietta College

Session 16-A    Melville’s Money

2.         “‘The Universal Confounding and Distorting of Things’: Money and Poverty in Melville’s Magazine Pieces,” Madison Furrh, Colorado State University-Pueblo

3.         “Dead Letters Circulated: ‘Bartleby’ in an Age of Communications Revolution,” Yoshiaki Furui, Emory University

Session 17-G    Roundtable on Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins’ Of One Blood 

4.         “Distributed Agency among Pauline Hopkins, the Colored American Magazine, and Of One Blood,” Michelle N. Huang, The Pennsylvania State University

Session 18-E    Form and Expectation in Early American Literature 

5.         “Expectation and Plebeian Blindness in Late Eighteenth-Century Newspapers and Jestbooks,” Jennifer Thorn, St. Anselm College

Session 18-G    Depictions of Women in the 19^th Century Press 

2.         “Deferring for the Ladies: Narrative Beginnings and Sarah Hale’s the Ladies’ Magazine,” Lydia G. Fash, Boston University

Session 21-H    Women’s Roles Revisited 

3.         “‘And why should not four women make up a party to go and learn from the lips of the sages?’: The Woman’s Journal and Women’s Pilgrimage to Concord, Massachusetts,” Todd Richardson, University of Texas of the Permian Basin