To maximize participation by our various far-flung members, RSVP will continue to host Digital Events on the conference theme in the weeks leading up to our in-person gathering. Panels for 2026 will take place on 5 June and 26 June 2026 at 8 a.m. PST / 11 a.m. EST/ 4 p.m. GMT / 5 p.m. CET.
Registration for these events is free and open to all. You do not need to register for the conference to present at or attend them. That said:
- All presenters must be active members of RSVP, and
- All presenters and attendees must register for the session to receive the Zoom link (registration links are below)
“Art in the Victorian Press: Tariffs, Botanicals, Replicas”
June 5, 2026
8 a.m. PT / 11 a.m. ET / 4 p.m. BST / 5 p.m. CET (60-minute session)
- Julie Codell (Arizona State University), “The Art Press and the Debate Over Artists’ Autograph Replicas”
- Anne Helmreich (Smithsonian), “Tariffs: Friction and the Transatlantic Trade in Art”
- Lindsay Wells, “Indian Botanical Art and the Victorian Horticultural Press”
In this panel, three art historians explore changes, movements, and migrations through the topics of tariffs and the mobility of art works, the art press promotion of replicas, and images of imperial plants and botany in the horticultural press. Anne Helmreich will address the effect of U.S. tariffs on the accelerating transatlantic trade and the ensuing debates in the nineteenth-century English-speaking press. Lindsay Wells will examine illustrations of South Asian plants and Indian botanical art in the horticultural press. Julie Codell will examine how the popular art press treated artists’ autograph replicas, a much-debated topic among artists and collectors that prompted government copyright legislation, to address how the press and the public described and evaluated replicas.
About Our Speakers
Julie Codell is a Professor of Art History at Arizona State University, and affiliate in Film, English, and Asian Studies. She wrote The Victorian Artist (Cambridge UP, 2003) and has edited and co-edited 10 anthologies on Victorian art, culture, and empire. She contributed articles to VPR on the art press and edited three special issues of VPR on Victorian art (1991), the Indian press (2004), and domesticity (2018). She was president of RSVP from 1999 to 2001 and is currently on the Senior Advisory Board.
Anne Helmreich is the Director of Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution. Prior, she served in roles at the J. Paul Getty Trust; TCU; and CWRU. Her co-authored essay “The Middle Men of Art: Knoedler’s and the building of the great American collections,” recently appeared in The Art Market and the Museum (Bloomsbury, 2025) and her essay “Knoedler in the Art Market: Building Galleries, Business Strategies, and the International Brand,” in Money in the Air: Art Dealers and the Making of a Transatlantic Art Market, 1890-1930 (Getty, 2024).
Lindsay Wells is an Instructor in Architecture and Interior Design at UCLA Extension. Her research explores the visual culture of imperialism, gardening, and botany in the British Empire. She received her Ph.D. in art history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and has held postdoctoral fellowships at the Huntington Library, the Getty Research Institute, and UCLA. Her essays on nineteenth-century horticulture have recently appeared in Literature Compass and Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature.
“Migrations Through the Local Press”
June 26, 2026
8 a.m. PT / 11 a.m. ET / 4 p.m. BT / 5 p.m. CET (60-minute session)
- Andrew Hobbs, “Liverpool’s Forgetful Newspapers and the Difficult History of Slave Trading”
- Lisa Peters, “’Surely they cannot be genuine Welshmen’: Welsh Press Responses to the Establishment of a Colony in Patagonia”
- Simon Young, “Migrating Notes & Queries: From Periodical to Local Newspapers”
The local press took a distinctive approach to literal and metaphorical migrations, thanks to its explicitly geographical worldview. Lisa Peters compares the attitudes of local newspapers to the Welsh colonisation of/emigration to Argentina in the 1860s, according to their location (Wales or England) and language (Welsh or English). While many Welsh newspapers were proud of the project, the opposite was true for Liverpool and the trade in enslaved people, as discussed in Andrew Hobbs’s paper. After British abolition of the trade (1807) and slavery itself (1833), local pride compelled Liverpool newspapers to forget or downplay the city’s central and highly lucrative role in the trade, demonstrating the limitations of the local press as a publisher of historical writing. Moving to migration as a metaphor, Simon Young explores a specific publishing format for historical writing, in which readers’ historical and antiquarian questions were answered by other readers. The format migrated from a national periodical, Notes & Queries (est. 1849) to the columns of local newspapers, and from there to free-standing local periodicals and bound volumes. These three papers explore the way that local pride (profitable, yet deeply felt) influenced coverage of migrations, and the metaphorical immigration of a publishing format.
About Our Speakers
Dr. Andrew Hobbs recently retired from the University of Lancashire. His 2018 open-access book, A Fleet Street in every town: The provincial press in England, 1855-1900 (Open Book Publishers) won RSVP’s 2019 Colby Book Prize, and he is about to publish the second volume of diaries by provincial journalist Anthony Hewitson, who published many volumes of local history. Andrew is working on a survey of historical writing in the nineteenth century local press.
Dr. Lisa Peters is a historian of the nineteenth-century Welsh press. Her work has appeared in Welsh History Review, Publishing History, and Print, Politics and the Provincial Press in Modern Britain. Lisa is currently working on a 4-volume series called Primary Sources on Nineteenth-Century Journalism with Beth Gaskell, Andrew Hobbs, and Marysa Demoor.
Simon Young is a British folklore historian, based in Italy. He has a longstanding interest in the study of supernatural beliefs. In 2022, he published The Boggart (Exeter UP) and Nail in the Skull and other Victorian Urban Legends (University of Mississippi Press).