NVSA 2025 Graduate Student Essay Prize
The Northeast Victorian Studies Association (NVSA) awards an annual prize for essays that expand the geographic, ethnic, racial, temporal, and methodological diversity of scholarship in the field. The award will recognize work that foregrounds nineteenth-century texts, contexts, perspectives, and insights by or about British colonial subjects residing outside the metropole or by or about immigrants and their descendants residing within it. We also welcome submissions that speak more broadly to the centrality of race, ethnicity, and imperialism in the shaping of global Victorian literature and culture. Essays should be 20-30 pages long and authors must be graduate students at the time of submission.
Winners will receive registration to the annual NVSA conference and a $250 check, and the prize committee will offer help, if wanted, in placing the essay with a journal. The prize is neither contingent on publication nor the promise of future publication.
Submit essays to Meghna Sapui at mxs8454@miami.edu by February 15, 2025.
“Expanding the Field” Essay Prize Winners
2025: Tingcong Lin (University of Hong Kong), “An Arhat Marco Polo: Distance as a Discursive Strategy and Transcultural (Re)productions of a (Hi)story in Between”; Honorable mention: Rachel McCoy (Ohio State University), “Liberties of the Unpublished: Crafts’s Fan Critique of Bleak House and Jane Eyre”
2024 (tied winners): Michelle Radnia (UCLA), “Beyond the Garden Borders: Toru Dutt, the Sonnet, and the Horticultural Imaginary in Nineteenth-Century British India,” AND Sebastian Egholm Lund (Aarhus University), “Aerofeminism in the Anthropocene: Aeronautics, Feminism, and Atmospheric Control in Mary Bradley Lane’s Mizora and Rokeya Hossain’s ‘Sultana’s Dream.'” Honorable mention: Cherrie Kwok (University of Virginia), “Whimsical, Suggestive, Slight: The Quare Dandyism of W.E.B. Du Bois”
2023: Olivia Lingyi Xu (Northwestern U), “Haggard in China: Translating Race in A Global History of the Novel”; Honorable Mention: Chandrica Barua (U of Michigan), “‘Poor little princess’: Queen Victoria’s Court as a Site of Imperial Conquest”
2022: Suvendu Ghatak (U of Florida), Honorable Mention: Imogen Forbes-Macphail (UC Berkeley)
2021: Diana Rose Newby (Columbia); Honorable Mentions: Corbin Hiday (UIC) and Meghna Sapui (U of Florida)
2020: Lindsay Wells; Honorable Mention: Gavi Levy Haskell
2019: Erica Kanesaka Kalnay; Honorable Mentions: Erin Akerman and Patrick Mahoney
Northeast Victorian Studies Association 