NAVSA Prizes

 

The Donald Gray Prize

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.

Sarah Winter (U of Connecticut), "Darwin’s Saussure: Biosemiotics and Race in Expression," Representations no. 107 (2009), pp. 128-161.

The Donald Gray Prize committee admired Sarah Winter’s article for its intellectually serious re-reading of Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872).  Winter demonstrates that Darwin anticipates the work of Saussure and explores the scientist’s biosemiotic thinking.  However, the article also develops into a major discussion of the nature of race in the nineteenth century and argues that Darwin prefigures a post-racial science today.  As one judge commented, the article makes "a careful and wide-ranging argument, which will resonate with scholars in numerous areas."  Anyone working on Darwin, Saussure, race or issues around physiognomy and expression needs to read Sarah Winter’s stimulating work.  

Honourable Mention:

Rachel Teukolsky (Vanderbilt U), "Pictures in Bleak Houses: Slavery and the Aesthetics of Transatlantic Reform," ELH vol. 76 (2009), pp. 491-522.

The Donald Gray Prize committee agreed that this was a strikingly sophisticated and intellectually confident analysis that reads Bleak House convincingly in terms of the debates on slavery but also links it to problems in literary realism.   The essay managed to offer a fresh approach despite the extensive work on the impact of slavery and race on Victorian literature that we have seen recently.  One judge particularly admired the article’s focus on aesthetics and the fine arts and considered the use of Hannah Crafts’ recently rediscovered novel, The Bondswoman’s Narrative, to be "illuminating and beautifully managed."   We all enjoyed the quality of Teukolsky’s writing as well as the sophistication of her argument.


Graduate-Student Paper Prize

Congratulations to the winners of the 2010 Graduate-Student Paper Prize!

Naomi Levine (Rutgers), "Trebled Beauty: William Morris's Terza Rima." This essay is an extraordinarily sensitive, nuanced reading of "The Defense of Guenevere." Levine's knowledge of both the literary tradition and critical history of terza rima is impressive, and her brilliantly accomplished reading of this little-noticed aspect of Morris' poem is important not only for Morris studies but for scholarship on Victorian poetics in general.

Honorable mentions:

David Sweeney Coombs (Cornell U), "Beautiful Graffiti: Vernon Lee and the Semiotics of Perception." Building on another scholar's work, this essay greatly extends our understanding of Vernon Lee's importance to the Aesthetic Movement while also demonstrating the significance of new theories of sense perception to the politics of the movement. Coombs writes clearly about extremely complex material, and his argument makes a substantial contribution to scholarship on the Aesthetic Movement.

Catherine Cronquist Browning (U of California, Berkeley), "Shrinking Bodies, Expanding Scopes: Omniscience in the Victorian Child Fantasy Novel." This essay unlocks the significant critical potential of seemingly whimsical literary fantasies. By examining the changing size of children in literary texts, this sparkling and delightful essay draws provocative links between child development, optical scale, and social critique. Moving masterfully between several literary texts, recent criticism, and intellectual histories, Cronquist Browning offers an original and exemplary piece of criticism.