Françoise Baillet

RSVP Conference 2025 – RSVP Dates July 10-12, 2025

Looking forward to meeting again the lovely @rs4vp.org community in Chicago!
conference.rs4vp.org

Honoured and delighted to have been selected for an American Trust for the British Library Research Fellowship 2025-2026!

I am very grateful for this opportunity to spend time working on the Punch Archive at the BL and on the extraordinary C19 collections at the Houghton Library, Harvard University

CFP: Special VPR Issue (Winter 2026) – RSVP Call for proposals for a special issue of VPR honoring the late Brian Maidment! Proposals due May 15, 2025 and will be published Winter 2026.

CFP: Essays in Honor of Brian Maidment (Proposals due May 15; Essays due Nov. 1). Guest editors Mary Elizabeth Leighton and Lisa Surridge invite proposals for a special issue of VPR. For full details, visit rs4vp.org/cfp-vpr-spec... @rs4vp.bsky.social

Many thanks to everyone who joined us online and on campus for our seminar on Wednesday afternoon! So proud of the amazing 19C research undertaken by our staff & students. We're especially grateful to Jereon Salman from Utrecht for his fascinating plenary on European penny prints and modernist art.

Thanks Helena!

Thrilled to announce that I have been awarded a Houghton Library Visiting Fellowship, Harvard University, for 2025-2026!

Very grateful for this opportunity, and looking forward to a bookworm year 📚

Excellent news! 'Pictorial Punch - Treasures from the Archive' has received the support of the @paulmelloncentr.bsky.social

Don't miss our November 7, 2025 study day at the British Library. CFP available below.

A lovely, erudite, and extremely generous scholar, from whom I learnt so much. Brian will be greatly missed.

What a lovely surprise, today, to learn that @universite-caen.bsky.social holds complete runs of The Yellow Book and The Savoy! The collections will now be given pride of place among our Victorian holdings. #TheYellowBook #TheSavoy

Yes, and the men follow the show live on their phones, visible on the table. Those Regency Tinder kids...

simultaneously horrific and amazing www.britishmuseum.org/collection/o...

Wonderful findings in Punch's Pocket Book today: a child's multicoloured collage and a student's sketches (1879 & 1880). Also found: a coded message!

MP of the Month: Sir Charles Tilston Bright (1832-1888), pioneering telegraph engineer An important aspect of our study of the reformed Commons is the degree to which representatives of science and industry were incorporated into the legislature during a period of great economic expa…

Six years ago our MP of the Month for February was Charles Tilston Bright, a pioneering telegraph engineer, who laid the first Atlantic telegraph cable. He was Liberal MP for Greenwich. Find out more about him in our blog: victoriancommons.wordpress.com/2019/02/20/m...

Going through some absolutely wonderful boxes of preparatory sketches for Punch by Leech, Tenniel, Furniss and many others. Seeing art in the making is just fantastic (and very moving). #BritishLibrary #ArchivesandManuscripts #PunchArchive

A Victorian take on gender terminology from Punch's Pocket Book for 1854.

Lewis Carroll collection given to his Oxford college in surprise US donation Exclusive: Christ Church college taken aback to receive hundreds of the author’s letters, photos and rare items Thousands of letters, photographs, illustrations and books from one of the world’s largest private Lewis Carroll collections have been donated…

Lewis Carroll collection given to his Oxford college in surprise US donation

How I think I look when teaching / How I actually look

🚀📈 Making Victorian visual culture searchable: Introducing an open-access and AI-powered dataset of 72,000 illustrations from the Illustrated London News (1842-1890). (w. Bethany Warner, @pfyfe.bsky.social and @bcgl.bsky.social)

openhumanitiesdata.metajnl.com/articles/10....

Impressive!

In Memoriam: Remembering Brian Maidment – RSVP A tribute from RSVP president Priti Joshi to past president and long-time member, Brian Maidment, who passed away January 28, 2025.

The great historian of the early 19th-c. comic press, Brian Maidment, died last week. He was as deeply appreciated for his personal kindness as for his brilliant work, and I treasured his friendship. @pritijoshi.bsky.social has written a lovely tribute: rs4vp.org/in-memoriam-... #C19

Ne ratez pas l'expo consacrée aux 600 ans d’histoire de notre @universite-caen.bsky.social avec des documents d’archives, des plans de Caen (1575-2025) et de nombreuses photos.
Un projet labellisé Millénaire Caen 2025
📅Du 04 au 26/02
📍 Église du Vieux St Sauveur
caen.fr/evenement/hi...

Oxford University Press will be awarding as many as 10 ECRs the opportunity to publish their first book in fully open access as well as in hardback. Today the website was revised to make clear that independent/unaffiliated scholars are eligible. Deadline March 3. academic.oup.com/pages/early-...

RIP David Lynch. Dang. This is devastating.

🥁 Announcing the Public Domain Image Archive! 🥁

We are v excited to share our new sister-project, the Public Domain Image Archive (PDIA), a curated collection of 10k+ out-of-copyright historical images, all free to explore and reuse: pdimagearchive.org @pdimagearchive

How did developments in adult education from 1823 shape Birkbeck, and how has the college adapted to survive over time?

Read Laurel Brake's fantastic article, followed by Robyn Jakeman's timeline, at 19.bbk.ac.uk

Journée d'étude OAB-CREW Question d'agrégation Mouvements protestataires, contestations politiques et luttes sociales en Grande-Bretagne (1811- 1914) - Centre de Recherches Anglophones (CREA)

🤓 Rdv le 31 janvier prochain à Nanterre pour la JE spéciale agrég « Mouvements protestataires, contestations politiques et luttes sociales en Grande-Bretagne (1811-1914) » !
Infos et abstracts ➡️
oabrit.hypotheses.org/category/col...
et sur le site du CREA
crea.parisnanterre.fr/colloques-et...

Dear colleagues and friends,
ERIBIA (Équipe de Recherche Interdisciplinaire sur la Grande-Bretagne, l'Irlande et l'Amérique du Nord) wishes you all a successful and fulfilling New Year 2025.

(All pictures were taken on campus last winter)