The Sally Mitchell Dissertation Prize is awarded annually to the best Ph.D. dissertation, defended in the previous calendar year, that explores the British periodical press of the long nineteenth century (including magazines, newspapers, and serial publications of all kinds) as an object of study in its own right, not as a source of material for other historical topics. Winners of the prize receive a monetary award of $1,000 and a two-year membership to RSVP.

Microgrants are seed grants designed to support new research projects and/or explore ideas in the field of periodical studies.

The Microgrants scheme was established in response to the 2025 survey of RSVP’s members, who informed us that they would benefit greatly from access to smaller pockets of funding for existing or exploratory projects. (For our full list of awards, please see the Eligibility chart). The funding for these grants is made possible through the generosity of the late Eileen Curran, Professor Emerita of English, Colby College, and inspired by her pioneering research on Victorian periodicals.

This guaranteed panel (in-person at the Modern Language Association in Los Angeles, California; January 7-10, 2027) takes a cue from the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of African American Humor Studies and seeks 250-word proposals that discuss how African American humorists eschew "just jokes" to articulate personal and collective selfhood and freedom. Please submit abstracts by Monday, March 16 to dmorgan@scu.edu. This panel is sponsored by the Screen Arts and Culture Committee.

Accepted presenters must be MLA members by April 1, 2026. 

C21 is inviting scholars and researchers to contribute book review essays for upcoming issues. We currently have a selection of titles published in 2025 available for review, spanning literary studies, film and media studies, cultural studies, and gender and sexuality studies. We invite prospective authors to submit ideas for review essays that discuss 2–3 recently published scholarly texts. For the full CFP, and to see our list of available titles, please visit: https://c21.openlibhums.org/news/923/.

Existing scholarship in Asian (North) American Literature has long examined travel narratives about Asian travelers within immigrant or diasporic paradigms: Sau-ling Wong famously establishes the Necessity/Extravagance framework in understanding transpacific mobility by early Asian American immigrants (1993), whereas Chih-ming Wang reads the autobiographical travelogues by diasporic Vietnamese American writers as “homecoming stories” (2013), and Patricia Chu interprets them as “return narratives” deploying acts of countermemory and postmemory to address racial melancholia (2019).