The theme of Structures takes inspiration from the host city of Ottawa, where natural and built environments intersect in ways that foreground questions of infrastructure, governance, and historical memory. From the Algonquin Anishnaabe stewardship of the region to Ottawa’s designation as Canada’s capital by Queen Victoria in 1857 and its iconic Neo-Gothic architecture, the city invites reflection on ‘structure’ in both literal and metaphorical senses. While structure can refer to the arrangement of parts into an identifiable whole, it also invokes Raymond Williams’s structure of feeling and, more recently, Brian Larkin’s conception of infrastructure as the material and relational systems that enable movement and connection.

We welcome proposals on any aspect of nineteenth-century British periodicals or newspapers, including—but not limited to—the following:

• Texts, paratexts, and editorial arrangement
• Literary form, serialization, and the architecture of newspapers and magazines
• Typography, layout, and visual organization
• Publishing, printing, and production systems
• Distribution and communication infrastructures (railway, postal, telegraph)
• Networks of contributors, editors, publishers, readers, and translators
• Information management, archives, classification, data and databases
• Institutional structures (scientific, legal, governmental, religious, educational)
• Queering and querying (hetero)normative infrastructures
• Empire, colonial administration, and global circulation
• Economic structures, advertising, and markets
• Social structures of class, gender, race, and labour
• Infrastructures of the Black press in Canada and other areas of the British Empire
• Monuments, ruins, and the material cultures of print
• Structural failure, censorship, repair, and alternative publishing networks
• Structures of feeling, resistance, and counterstructures
• Digital methods and pedagogies for studying Victorian periodicals
• Indigenous presence in the periodical press

We encourage applicants to consider the form, materiality, and/or genre of periodicals, rather than focusing solely on the content that appears within them.

More information can be found on the main RSVP website. You can submit your finished proposal here.

The 2027 RSVP Conference Committee
Helena Goodwyn (chair), Janice Schroeder (local organizer), Michelle Elleray, and Isabel Seidel