PhD Project: Short lived newspapers
My prizewinning PhD (see below) focused on short-lived nineteenth-century newspapers and periodicals, aiming to reassess conventional ideas of success and failure in the nineteenth-century press. Working with the British Library’s newspaper collections and combining data analysis approaches with detailed case studies, my work sought to challenge orthodox views of ‘success’ that have been associated primarily with long-running, London-centred newspapers. I argue that, collectively, short-lived newspapers represent a substantial proportion of the papers in print throughout the century and are therefore a critically-overlooked segment of the press as experienced by contemporary readers. I explore how the nineteenth century’s fundamental instability was reflected in its newspapers, which appeared, adapted, merged and disappeared in bewildering numbers. Dismissing substantial numbers of shorter-lived papers as de facto failures places historical scholarship in danger of misrepresenting the complexity of the press experienced by nineteenth-century readers.
Conference Papers
I have presented at…
2026 Research Society for Victorian Periodicals Conference, Trinity College Dublin. Title of paper: A tale of two cities: New York, London and the mystery of The Days’ Doings.
2026 British Association for Victorian Studies Conference, Liverpool John Moores University. Title of paper: The worst of ‘Times’: Dirty tricks in the mid-century illustrated press.
2025 Research Society for Victorian Periodicals Conference, Loyola University, Chicago, IL, USA. Title of paper: ‘A Brief Spell of Enthusiasm: The Fonetic Nuz and the Vision of English Spelling Reform’.
2024 Research Society for Victorian Periodicals conference, University of Stirling, Scotland, UK. Title of paper: ‘An ill wind from the west: The role of America in the fate of the Illustrated news of the world, 1858-1863′.
2023 ESPRit (European Society for Periodicals Research) conference, Leeds, UK. Title of Paper: ‘Scanning the horizon: What can a distance-reading methodology reveal about the motivations for founding newspapers in the nineteenth century?’
2022 Research Society for Victorian Periodicals conference (virtual). Title of Paper: ‘Only the ephemeral is of lasting value: How short-lived newspapers offer new perspectives on the history of the nineteenth-century press’.
Prizes and Publications
- Sally Mitchell Dissertation Prize 2026, awarded by the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP) for my PhD thesis, entitled ‘Poor Players? The role of short-lived newspapers in re-evaluating success and failure in the nineteenth-century periodical press.
- Rosemary VanArsdel Prize 2023, awarded by RSVP for my essay The Long and Short of it: rethinking the longevity of nineteenth-century periodicals’ – winner of the 2023 Rosemary VanArdsel Prize awarded Research Society for Victorian Periodicals.
Published in Victorian Periodicals Review, 57:1&2, Spring/Summer 2024.
Other Forthcoming Publications
- ‘You are not a moral people, and you know it’: Respectability, Obscenity and The Days’ Doings (1870-1872), for The Edinburgh History of the Radical Press 1780-1914, Vol. 1: The Socially Radical Press (with Professor Bob Nicholson)
- Keywords essays on ‘Endings’ and ‘Business’ for the 60th Anniversary edition of Victorian Periodicals Review (2027)