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.

Next week I’m going to the Lake District to begin a new collaboration with at Dove Cottage, Wordsworth’s former home in Grasmere. I’ll be curating an exhibition that will appear in their museum throughout the autumn. It’s going to be called ‘Wordsworth, Photography, and the Invention of the Lake District’ and it emerges from research that I’ve done for my new book on photographically-illustrated Victorian editions of Wordsworth. I’ll also be going there to give some talks about this research in October. More details soon.

Yesterday I was at the British Library to celebrate Academic Book Week, and to help launch a collection of essays called The Academic Book of the Future. The collection opens with an essay by me, called ‘The Academic Book as Socially-Embedded Media Artefact’. It’s being published by Palgrave in their Pivot series, which means you can get it in both electronic and paper form. You can see more details here.