I’m delighted to announce that I have been awarded the inaugural Linda H. Peterson fellowship by the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals. The fellowship, worth $17,500, will allow me a period of focussed research time in the Fall of 2017. I’ll be working on a new project called ‘Periodicals and the Policing of Literary Culture’, which examines how periodical writers constructed a position of authority from which to pronounce judgment on the culture around them. Drawing on the work of J.L. Austen and other thinkers who have examined performative utterances, I explore the periodical writers’ self-authorising style. The fellowship is named for the late Linda H. Peterson (1948-2015), Niel Gray, Jr. Professor of English at Yale University. Linda Peterson was a pioneering scholar of periodical studies who served as RSVP vice president from 2009 to 2013. More information on the fellowship is available here.