Honorary Professor awarded fellowship to study historical labour press reports on foreign migration

David Finkelstein, UCL Honorary Professor in the Department of Information Studies, has been awarded a prestigious Curran Fellowship by the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP) for a project studying British Labour press responses to foreign migrant labour in the early 1900s. This fellowship, one of only ten awarded in 2025 by the international research organisation dedicated to the study of press and periodicals over the long nineteenth century, will provide funds for Finkelstein to visit archival holdings in Edinburgh, Glasgow, London and Oxford to gather material from over 50 newspapers produced by local and national branches of the British Independent Labour Party (ILP).

The ILP was a socialist movement of skilled and semi-skilled workers launched as a political party in 1893, whose members would go on to play key roles in founding and leading its successor, the British Labour Party, from 1906 onwards. Over 50 journals were founded by the ILP to inform their members between the 1890s and 1910, representing an important strand of political expression in the British labour movement of the turn of the twentieth century. Professor Finkelstein’s project will examine news coverage of US and British colonial labour migration in these journals during a twenty-year period (1890-1910) of heightened political concern about Chinese and other foreign labourers in the US, South Africa and Australia. The aim is to reveal for the first time how such reporting fed into early 1900s British debates on immigration, shaping views and policies that continue to influence current political thinking. The results will feature in a commissioned piece for a forthcoming edited volume on the history of the radical press, to be published by Edinburgh University Press.

The Curran Fellowships are travel and research grants intended to aid scholars studying British magazines and newspapers from the long nineteenth century in making use of primary print and archival sources. Further information on the award can be found here: https://rs4vp.org/awards/curran-fellowship