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NAVSA Prizes
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.) See below for the new nominations deadline and instructions for the Donald Gray Prize.
The Donald Gray Prize
Congratulations to the winners of the annual Donald Gray prize!
- Co-winner: Kriegel, Lara. "Culture and the Copy: Calico, Capitalism, and Design Copyright in Early Victorian Britain." Journal of British Studies 43 (April 2004): 233-65.
Lara Kriegel's "Culture of the Copy" is a lively and engaging analysis of productive culture and cultural production in the first half of the nineteenth century. It is an extraordinarily well-written piece and develops a complex and compelling argument about the ways (contra Benjamin) in which the industrial (re)production of designs increased rather than decreased the value of the "original." The argument has broad implications and is articulated with confidence and verve.
- Co-winner: Kucich, John. "Sadomasochism and the Magical Group: Kipling's Middle-Class Imperialism." Victorian Studies 46.1 (2003): 33-68.
John Kucich's "Sadomasochism and the Magical Group" is a provocative re-reading of Kipling through the lens of relational psychoanalysis, arguing that sadomasochistic "magical thinking" explains Kipling's ambivalence about empire and his class politics. Kucich uses theorizations of sadomasochism to provide an extraordinary degree of insight not only into Kipling but also into the entire psychological framework of late-Victorian imperialism.
- Honorable Mention: Ketabgian, Tamara. "'Melancholy Mad Elephants': Affect and the Animal Machine in Hard Times." Victorian Studies 45.4 (2003): 649-76.
Tamara Ketabgian's "'Melancholy Mad Elephants'" is a wonderfully creative and thoughtful piece, which sets the imagery of machines ("melancholy mad elephants") in Dicken's Hard Times against the context of early Victorian physiology and psychiatry. Ketabgian's analysis of the "animal machine" as a potential site for the critique of the Victorian social and industrial order is innovative and refreshing.
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.
2006 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 2005 and 31 December 2005. 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 Friday, 7 April 2006:
- a brief cover sheet with complete address and email information for both the essay's nominator and its author, and
- 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 43606Questions 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
Graduate Student Paper Prize
Congratulations to the winners of the 2005 Graduate Student Paper Prize!
- Winner: David Kurnick (Columbia U), "Empty Houses: Thackeray's Theater
of Interiority"
Kurnick's ambitious essay corrects recent scholarship on the
nineteenth-century British novel's relation to theater, demonstrating with
great subtlety how the novel's "frustrated theatrical desire" produced new
narrative modes even as it incorporated a kind of performative nostalgia.
Kurnick deftly explores the persistence of a marginalized genre in both
formal and thematic characteristics of mainstream fiction; his reading of
Thackeray is much larger than a paper on a single novelist: it has major
implications for narrative studies generally. It thereby models
single-author criticism at its very best.
- Honorable Mention: Lisa Brocklebank (Brown U), "Psychic Reading"
Most studies of late-nineteenth-century spiritualism simply revel in its
eccentricity, but Brocklebank investigates the impact of fin-de-siècle
psychics on widely shared cultural attitudes toward reading and
consciousness. The essay sheds important new light on late-Victorian
expectations about reading, as well as qualifying theories of literature
that regard it as a tool of social control.
- Honorable Mention: Nathan Hensley (Duke U), "'Sir Richard Burton,'
Orientalist: Empire, Islam, and the Politics of Nonidentity"
Hensley's essay not only demonstrates the multivalence of Sir Richard
Burton's public and private persona, which has too often been taken as a
monolithic icon of imperial subjectivity; it also uses that multivalence to
complicate the relationship empire studies often assume between ideology and
identity.
Congratulations to all six winners of the NAVSA prizes!
Congratulations to the winners of the 2005 Graduate Student Paper Prize!
- Winner: David Kurnick (Columbia U), "Empty Houses: Thackeray's Theater
of Interiority"
Kurnick's ambitious essay corrects recent scholarship on the nineteenth-century British novel's relation to theater, demonstrating with great subtlety how the novel's "frustrated theatrical desire" produced new narrative modes even as it incorporated a kind of performative nostalgia. Kurnick deftly explores the persistence of a marginalized genre in both formal and thematic characteristics of mainstream fiction; his reading of Thackeray is much larger than a paper on a single novelist: it has major implications for narrative studies generally. It thereby models single-author criticism at its very best.
- Honorable Mention: Lisa Brocklebank (Brown U), "Psychic Reading"
Most studies of late-nineteenth-century spiritualism simply revel in its eccentricity, but Brocklebank investigates the impact of fin-de-siècle psychics on widely shared cultural attitudes toward reading and consciousness. The essay sheds important new light on late-Victorian expectations about reading, as well as qualifying theories of literature that regard it as a tool of social control.
- Honorable Mention: Nathan Hensley (Duke U), "'Sir Richard Burton,'
Orientalist: Empire, Islam, and the Politics of Nonidentity"
Hensley's essay not only demonstrates the multivalence of Sir Richard Burton's public and private persona, which has too often been taken as a monolithic icon of imperial subjectivity; it also uses that multivalence to complicate the relationship empire studies often assume between ideology and identity.
Congratulations to all six winners of the NAVSA prizes!