The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals is very pleased to award the annual Robert Colby Scholarly Book Prize for a scholarly book that most advances the understanding of the nineteenth-century British newspaper and/or periodical press. All books exploring periodicals of the period are eligible (including single-author monographs, edited collections, and editions) as long as they have a publication date of 2009. The winner will receive a plaque and a monetary award of up to $3,000, and will be invited to speak at the RSVP conference at Yale University in New Haven (September 10-11, 2010). The prize was made possible by a generous gift by Vineta Colby in honor of Robert Colby, a long and devoted member of RSVP and a major scholar in the field of Victorian periodicals.
Previous winners of the Colby Prize are:
- 2009: Catherine Waters, Commodity Culture in Dickens’s Household Words: The Social Life of Goods (Ashgate)
- 2008: Kathryn Ledbetter, Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals: Commodities in Context (Ashgate)
- 2007: David Finkelstein, Ed., Print Culture and the Blackwood Tradition (University of Toronto Press)
- 2005-2006: Linda Hughes, Graham R.: Rosamund Marriott Watson, Woman of Letters (Ohio University Press) and Peter Morton, The Busiest Man in London: Grant Allen and the Writing Trade, 1875-1900 (Palgrave)