| North American Victorian Studies Association | Providing a forum for the discussion of the Victorian period, | Login |
sally mitchell Prize
The annual Sally Mitchell Prize recognizes the best paper presented by a graduate student at the annual NAVSA conference. All graduate students presenting a paper at the 2025 "Aftermaths" conference are invited to submit their papers for consideration. Papers must be received as electronic files (MS Word format preferred) by Monday, December 1, 2025. To be eligible, you must be a graduate student at the time of your presentation.
Because the contest honors the paper as it was given at the conference, please keep your essays to under 12 pages double-spaced, 8.5 x 11’ paper, inclusive of notes and works cited. (Handouts and slides or other images may be included as an appendix, if these were given at the conference.)
Please submit an electronic version of your essay as a single attachment to an email that contains the following information:
- your name
- affiliation (rank and dissertation director, if applicable)
- title of the paper
- snail mail and email address
The winning paper will be selected based on the following criteria: 1) potential significance for Victorian studies; 2) quality and depth of scholarly research and interpretation; and 3) clarity and effectiveness of presentation. The judges will choose one essay for the award and may also choose two honorary runners-up. The prize winner will receive $250 and a year's free NAVSA membership (including a subscription to Victorian Studies). If the judges are deadlocked, the final decision will be made by the NAVSA Executive Committee.
2025 Winners
From our judges, Barbara Black, Carolyn Dever, and Richard Menke:
In the process of reviewing the graduate student papers from NAVSA 2025 submitted for the Sally Mitchell Prize, the committee traveled across the globe and deep into the earth and the oceans, encountering new ways of thinking about important issues both familiar and new to us. We all know that it’s a difficult time for scholarly work in the humanities. The work of these early-career academics makes it very clear that the future they represent is bright. We admire, appreciate, and support this vital work.
Winner: Kit Pyne-Jaeger, Columbia U, “History, Decomposition, and Michael Field’s Ecopoetic Web.”
Kit Pyne-Jaeger’s paper begins by comparing Michael Field’s poetry to the lifeworld of a worm: Michael Field’s poetry, like the worms in Darwin’s 1881 work The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms, “evacuates the human self to foreground an immediacy of sensory experience bound up with the ecological.” In the rich and indeed loamy analysis that follows, Pyne-Jaeger traces the entanglements of a “Fieldean web,” after the “ecological web” that figures the ecosystemic processes across a wide array of investigations. For Michael Field, however, histories themselves–ranging from classical histories to personal histories of lost loved ones–manifest in the matter of the present in their decomposed forms. Michael Field’s ecopoetics is both a de- and a re-composition. Pyne-Jaeger’s focus is richly double: Edith Cooper’s loss of her father, James, and the “much-reanimated” Sappho for Field’s poetic project. Working deftly with various kinds of materials, from Darwin to diaries to lyric, Pyne-Jaeger lands on what may be the talk’s high point—a patiently attentive and beautiful close reading of the poem “Mouldering Leaves.” Here a reader senses the weaving of interdependence and unboundedness that characterizes the “living archive” of Michael Field.
Hon. Mention: Dylan Kelly, Queen’s U, Belfast, “Oscar Wilde’s Rhyme Crimes: The Aftermath of Victorian Rhyme.”
In “Oscar Wilde’s Rhyme Crimes,” Dylan Kelly focuses on Wilde’s poetry and its formal legacies as represented by his extensive yet oddly maladroit use of the idiosyncratic and associative—because melancholic—rhyme scheme of the In Memoriam stanza. With nimble close readings of rhyme and prosody, Kelly contrasts the unconvincing melodrama of Wilde’s early appropriations of the form with later poems in which he misuses the ABBA stanza with great subtlety, confidence, and skill. In doing so, argues Kelly, Wilde deliberately unsettles the “conception of craft as a harmony between form and affective content.”
Past Winners
2024 Conference
Winner: Uttara Chaudhuri, U of California, Berkeley, “Outward Forms: Gandhi, Wilde and Late Victorian Aesthetics”
Hon. Mention: Molly Porter, U of Washington, “John Muir, Re-creational Form and Fragment in Mount Rainier National Park”
2023 Conference
Winner: Ryan Carroll, U of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, “Revision and the Politics of Truth-Telling in The Autobiography of Juan Francisco Manzano”
Hon. Mention: Aaron Bartlett, U of Maryland, College Park, “Violent Form of Revision: Toru Dutt, Edmund Gosse, and the Racialized Body/Text”
2022 Conference
Winner: Alexis Ferguson, Princeton U, “On Knowing Nature's Syntax: Non-Cis Sex in Adam Bede”
Hon. Mention: Jessica Cook, UCLA, “Memory Machines: Charles Dodgson's Memoria Technica Poems”
2020-21 Conference
Winner: Rebeca Velasquez, U of Chicago, “From Jamaica to England: The Legal Worlds of George Eliot’s Felix Holt”
Hon. Mention: Chloe Truong-Jones, NYU, “Judicious Colonization: Alexander Maconochie Penal Reform in 19th-Century Colonial Australia”
2019 Conference
Winner: Megan Arkenberg, U of California, Davis, “Novel on the Brain”: Vernon Lee’s Neural Media”
Hon. Mention: Jacob Romanow, Rutgers U, “Unmaking Genre: Towards a History of the Novel as Melodrama”
2018 Conference
Winner: Imogen Forbes-Macphail, U of California, Berkeley, “Time, Space, and Ekphrasis”
2017 Conference
Winner: Erica Kalnay, U of Wisconsin, Madison, “Beatrix Potter’s Mycological Aesthetics”
2016 Conference
Winner: Noa Reich, U of Toronto, “Speculation, Mortmain, and the Subjects of Middlemarch”
2015 Conference
Winner: Rebecca Jayne Hildebrand, Columbia U, “Middlemarch's Medium: Description, Sympathy, and Realism's Ambient Worlds”
2014 Conference
Winner: Christie Allen, U of Michigan, “Mysterious and Marvellous: Classification of Victorian Fiction in Mudie’s Catalogue”
2013 Conference
Co-winner: Anna Gibson, Duke U, “Sensation, Science, and (Un)predictable People”
Co-winner: Jessie Reeder, U of Wisconsin, Madison, “Trollope, Mexico, and the Narratives of National Finance”
2012 Conference
Co-winner: Naomi Levine, Rutgers U, “Arthur Hallam and the Origin of Rhyme”
Co-winner: John MacNeill Miller, Rutgers U, “Humanizing the Social Network in George Eliot and G. H. Lewes”
2011 Conference
Winner: James Emmott, Birkbeck College, U London, “‘You Can Turn Her On as Often as You Like’: Performing Phonographic Physiology”
Hon. Mention: Anna M. Gibson, Duke U, “Bodies Acting Out: Physiology, Narrative, and the Sensation Novel”
Hon. Mention: Ryan Fong, U California, Davis, “Oliver Twisted, or Performance and the Parish Boy’s Visual Progress”
2010 Conference
Winner: Naomi Levine, Rutgers U, "Trebled Beauty: William Morris's Terza Rima"
Hon. Mention: David Sweeney Coombs, Cornell U, "Beautiful Graffiti: Vernon Lee and the Semiotics of Perception"
Hon. Mention: Catherine Cronquist Browning, U of California, Berkeley, "Shrinking Bodies, Expanding Scopes: Omniscience in the Victorian Child Fantasy Novel"
2009 Conference
Winner: Henry Cowles, Princeton U, "A Victorian Extinction: The Great Auk, Alfred Newton, and Early Wildlife Protection"
Hon. Mention: Renée Fox, Princeton U, "Necromantic Browning"
2008 Conference
Winner: Richard Bonfiglio, U of Chicago, "Portable Passions: Eliot, Culture, and the Cultivation of Locality"
Hon. Mention: Nathan K. Hensley, Duke U, "Form and Excess, Morant Bay and Swinburne"
Hon. Mention: Nathaniel Stein, Brown U, "Manly Failings: Representation, Corporeality, and Failure in Queen Victoria's First Visit to Her Wounded Soldiers"
2007 Conference
Winner: Paul Fyfe, U of Virginia, "Accidents of a Novel Trade: Insurance, Industrial Catastrophe, and Mary Barton"
Hon. Mention: Maeve Adams, New York U, "Commendable Objects: Marginal Utility, Financial Realism, and the Novel in 1870s England"
Hon. Mention: Jesse Rosenthal, Columbia U, "Gamblers' Fallacies: Materialism, Realism, and Daniel Deronda at Play"
2006 Conference
Winner: Jason Lindquist, Indiana U, "On 'Imagination' and the Rise of a Victorian Aesthetics of Complexity"
Hon. Mention: Melissa McLeod, Georgia SU, "Acoustic Science and Racial Identity in Daniel Deronda"
Hon. Mention: Lisa M. Smith, U of Toronto, "Dorothea Through the Pier-Glass"
2005 Conference
Winner: David Kurnick, Columbia U, "Empty Houses"
Hon. Mention: Lisa Brocklebank, Brown U, "Psychic Reading"
Hon. Mention: Nathan Hensley, Duke U, "'Sir Richard Burton,' Orientalist"
2004 Conference
Winner: Heather Morton, U of Virginia, "Swinburne and Wilde on Whitman"
Hon. Mention: Sarah Rose Cole, Columbia U, "The Temple"
Hon. Mention: Kathleen O'Neill Sims, U of Virginia, "'Old Gardens,' 'Fresh Flowers'"