NAVSA awards two competitive prizes each year: the Donald Gray prize, for best essay on a Victorian topic, and the graduate paper prize, for the best paper read by a graduate student at the annual conference. (NAVSA also makes available travel grants, based on financial need.)

The Donald Gray Prize

Congratulations to the winners of the 2008 Donald Gray Prize! Honorees were chosen from essays published in journals during the 2007 calendar year.

NAVSA is delighted to announce the winners of the Donald Gray Prize for the Best Essay published in the field of Victorian studies in the previous year. Named after Donald J. Gray, Culbertson Professor Emeritus in the English Department of Indiana University, the Donald Gray Prize is awarded to the best essay that appeared in print in journals from the previous calendar year on any topic related to the study of Victorian Britain. It carries with it an award of $1000. Essays are self-nominated and are also submitted by journal editors and members of the NAVSA Advisory Board.

• Winner:Andrew Miller (English, Indiana University), "Lives Unled in Realist Fiction." Representations 98 (2007): 118-34.
  

  This outstanding article impressed the Gray Prize Committee by the way that, despite its relatively brief length, it opened up large issues concerning literary realism as a genre. In a superb discussion, the author considers the way in which Charles Dickens and Henry James related to the theme of paths not taken, of other lives that could have been led by their characters. These counter-factual narratives are described as "optative" and are argued to be a characteristic of realist fiction. The author's discussion focuses on the themes of marriage and lost children. The life unled highlights the way Dickens and James negotiated the contingency of modern life. This haunting and rich article makes big arguments and reassesses realist fiction in rewarding ways. The Committee was impressed by the readings of Dickens and James but also by the way that the analysis remained in the mind long after the article had been read. This article will have an enormous impact both within and beyond Victorian Studies.

• Honorable Mention: Linda Hughes (English, Texas Christian University), "What the Wellesley Index Left Out: Why Poetry Matters to Periodical Studies." Victorian Periodicals Review 40 (2007): 91-125.
  

  This major exercise in revisionism restores poetry to the study of Victorian periodicals. It takes issue with the decision of the editors of the Wellesley Index to exclude the listing of poetry. The author demonstrates that poetry was actually central to Victorian periodicals because of the importance of poetry in Victorian literary culture. Editors valued poetry because it "could enhance the cultural value and prestige of the periodical itself." Hughes's interdisciplinary analysis demonstrates the cultural work achieved by poetry in a range of periodicals, including its impact on their politics. She argues that poetry offered a different kind of time, "an unchanging zone beyond modernity," that contrasted with the "jumble of deracinated, ephemeral information" in wild juxtaposition elsewhere in the periodical. The Gray Prize Committee was impressed by the way that the field of Victorian poetry and Victorian periodicals looks different because of this article. The Committee commented that it is the kind of work that is likely to spur much good work in response, making an impact on both research and teaching.

2009 Gray Prize

The North American Victorian Studies Association is now seeking nominations for the annual Donald Gray Prize for best essay published in the field of Victorian Studies. The prize carries with it an award of $1000 and will be awarded to essays that appeared in print in journals from the previous calendar year, on any topic related to the study of Victorian Britain. (The prize is limited to journal essays; those published in essay collections are not eligible.) Anyone, regardless of NAVSA membership status, is free to nominate an essay that appeared in print between 1 January 2008 and 31 December 2008. Self-nominated essays are welcome; nominations will also be solicited from the Advisory Board of NAVSA and the prize committee judges. Authors may be from any country and of any institutional standing.

To nominate an essay, please submit by Wednesday, 1 April 2009 (that's a receipt deadline, not a postmark deadline):

1. a brief cover sheet with complete address and email information for both the essay's nominator and its author, and
2. four hard copies of the essay to the Executive Secretary of NAVSA at the following address:

   Melissa V. Gregory
   Department of English
   Mail Stop 925
   University of Toledo
   Toledo, Ohio 43606

Questions may be directed to melissa.gregory@utoledo.edu. Further information about the prize may be found at http://www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/engl/navsa/Prizes/GrayPrize.cfm

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Graduate Student Paper Prize

Congratulations to the winners of the 2008 Graduate Student Paper Prize!

• Winner: Richard Bonfiglio (English, University of Chicago), "Portable Passions: Eliot, Culture, and the Cultivation of Locality"
  

  Richard Bonfiglio's sophisticated paper urges us to see that, for Victorian liberalism, the goal of cosmopolitanism is not placelessness, but rather putting "English provincialism in dialogue with European culture and politics." This dynamic involves both detachment and proximity—or what Bonfiglio characterizes as "a portable sense of local attachment" that George Eliot develops first in Romola and then extends to Felix Holt. The graduate prize committee admired the elegant way Bonfiglio makes strange Felix Holt's Englishness, and the economy with which his thesis accounts for shifting representations of nationalism within Eliot's oeuvre. In addition to revising accounts of liberalism and cosmopolitanism, Bonfiglio's work also helps us understand different kinds of regionalism and provincialism within the English novel.

• Honorable Mention: Nathan K. Hensley (English, Duke University), "Form and Excess, Morant Bay and Swinburne"
  

  The graduate prize committee admired two different aspects of Nathan K. Hensley's essay: the remarkable energy of its prose, and the intelligence with which it reflects on its own critical procedures. Noting the contemporaneous arrival of Swinburne's Poems and Ballads and the news of Governor Eyre's violent imposition of martial law in Jamaica, Hensley shows how "a first-order liberal vocabulary of law, order, and humanity fell short of describing the stark imperatives of global power in a racialized empire." In a final section, Hensley also provocatively speculates about the critical uses of metaphor, rather than metonymy, in articulating disparate cultural discourses.

• Honorable Mention: Nathaniel Stein (History of Art and Architecture, Brown University), "Manly Failings: Representation, Corporeality, and Failure in Queen Victoria's First Visit to Her Wounded Soldiers"
  

  Focused on a detailed close reading of a single painting, this compelling paper points up the "vexed connections between representation, the senses, and sense-making in mid-Victorian culture." Rather than stopping with the observation that affect can shore up class, race, and gender identifications, Stein unpacks how representations of affect, especially around the wounded body, can complicate or undermine those identifications. The graduate prize committee admired Stein's ability to take a painting commonly read as a set piece of patriotic propaganda and to show how unsettling it is for viewers, both in 1856 and today.

Congratulations to all five winners of the NAVSA prizes!

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