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  • Periodicals, Pedagogy, and Collaboration
  • Teresa Mangum (bio)

From the classroom to the conferences hosted by the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals, learning about print culture is a uniquely collaborative experience. Periodical culture itself is, of course, a marketplace collective of writers, illustrators, editors, printers, advertisers, publishers, and a host of workers in related professions and trades. The more we learn of periodical consumers the more complex our sense of literacy, class connections, reading communities, and the spaces of reading. This diverse object of study invites an interdisciplinary scholarly response. Literary critics rely on economists to clarify the financial framework of periodicals and economists turn to art historians for an account of illustrations. The process teaches us the value of colleagues from myriad disciplines and the pleasures of endless discovery.

This volume grows from the panels on pedagogy that have become a regular feature of the annual RSVP conference. In fact, the volume originates in a personal collaboration with a member of our "near relation," the Research Society for American Periodicals. Kathleen Diffley, my Americanist colleague at the University of Iowa, has been teaching a nineteenth-century American periodical literature and culture course in our department for some time. I was inspired by her example and her brilliant syllabi and assignments to attempt a similar British course. When she and I organized a joint pedagogy panel at RSVP in 2002, we were delighted to meet fellow panelists who shared our excitement about periodical courses but also about using periodical assignments in our other literature courses. I am grateful to Kitty Ledbetter, the editor of VPR, for sharing our enthusiasm. [End Page 307]

Working with the contributors to this issue has been a further reminder of the great pleasures of collaboration. I have learned a great deal not only from the essays here but from conversations with each of the contributors about their research-in-practice in their classrooms. The essays fall into three clusters to emphasize distinctive approaches to periodical study: classes organized by theoretical questions, courses that bring literary analyses into conversation with the issues and methods of other disciplines, and courses that situate "English" periodicals in relation to other geographical spaces and politics.

As the essays evolved, I began receiving queries from the contributors. "Would you mind if I changed my topic? I've been talking with my colleagues and we would like to try to write this piece together," wrote one. "Can I quote my students' responses rather than sending a syllabus?" asked another. Undoing the mold of the conventional academic essay even more enthusiastically, yet another asked: "Would you mind if I wrote this piece with a group of students?" I should not have been surprised that thinking about teaching, and especially teaching periodicals, invited many of us to correspond with our students, to seek their advice and assessment, and to weave their voices together with our own.

I close the volume by reflecting on the opportunities to welcome students into our profession beyond classroom walls that periodical study can provide. I cannot thank my own students enough for all that they have taught me about periodicals from their own research or for their good company in that collaboration we call the classroom.

Teresa Mangum
University of Iowa
Teresa Mangum

Teresa Mangum is Associate Professor of English and International Programs at the University of Iowa and author of Married, Middle- Brow, and Militant: Sarah Grand and the New Woman Novel (1998). She is completing a book on Victorian conceptions of late life and beginning a project on animals and genre in the nineteenth century. Together with her Americanist colleague Kathleen Diffley, she is 446 Victorian Periodicals Review 39:4 Winter 2006 developing a graduate concentration in the study of nineteenth-century periodicals at the University of Iowa.

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