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.

First Prize: Matthew Kaiser, "Pater's Mouth," Victorian Literature and Culture 39.1 [2011]: 47-64.

First place in a strong and varied field goes to Matthew Kaiser’s sophisticated essay on Pater and taste – taste in the physical rather than the aesthetic sense. Drawing on eight Pater texts in a rich and lyrical essay, Kaiser’s informative references to art, classics, history, philosophy, philology, poetry, physiology, gastronomy, and Eucharistic imagery produce an exceptionally fine close reading and provocative argument.

Honorable Mention: Bradley Deane, "Imperial Boyhood: Piracy and the Play Ethic," Victorian Studies 53.4 (2011): 689-714. The judges were impressed by how Deane engaged the current conversation on gender and childhood studies, especially the need to look specifically at how "boyhood(s)" are produced and disseminated in a range of discourses. We particularly commend his careful attention to the specific historical and literary contexts of the late century, both as they drew on earlier imperial discourses and about legitimate and illegitimate violence, and as they look forward to early twentieth century developments, including the coming of WWI. His explication of how piracy and play forwarded ideological justifications of both formal and informal empire are provocative, and his attention to specific texts is distinguished by his refusal to organize texts into easy categories of resistant and hegemonic productions. The clarity and concision of his writing make this essay valuable and useable for scholars across a range of subfields.

Graduate-Student Paper Prize

This year's judges were Bradley Deane (University of Minnesota-Morris), Daniel Hack (University of Michigan), and Talia Schaffer (CUNY). NAVSA is inexpressibly grateful to them for their hard and careful work in reviewing a record number of essays.

Judge's Statement:

This year, the judges of the NAVSA Graduate Essay prize have taken the nearly unprecedented step of awarding two prizes. In a field of exceptionally well-crafted conference papers, two stood out, and the judges wished to recognize them both because each paper showcases different critical achievements that we felt were equally important to bring to our members' attention. John MacNeill Miller demonstrates how to use the growing field of animal studies to transform a canon we thought we knew, while Naomi Levine reveals how to incorporate archival discoveries into a deft consideration of the global politics of poetry. Levine's exemplary research, and Miller's remarkable use of a new theoretical school, equally reveal new aspects of Victorian thought.

CO-WINNER: Naomi Levine, Rutgers University

Committee's assessment: Beginning with its slyly captivating first sentence--"This paper is about one sentence in a footnote of an essay that almost nobody reads by a famous but minor Victorian writer--Naomi Levine's essay "Arthur Hallam and the Origin of Rhyme" is a remarkably assured piece of work. Naomi Levine's paper centers on her discovery that a line in an essay by Hallam derives from a passage in a work by Sismondi. This is satisfying enough, perhaps, to the more pedantic or antiquarian-minded among us. What makes the essay truly impressive, however, is the sensitivity and erudition with which Levine teases out the stakes of her find for both nineteenth-century literary historiography, with its debate over rhyme's geographical origin, and twenty-first century poetic theory, with its renewed interest in rhyme's affective power.


CO-WINNER: John MacNeill Miller, Rutgers University

Committee's assessment:Both witty and profound, John MacNeill Miller’s study of the diminishing role of dogs in George Eliot’s novels compellingly illustrates his claim that the transformation of her canine characters signals significant limits in her social and aesthetic project, and persuasively suggests new avenues toward a history of literary representations of animals. The judges were deeply impressed by this essay’s skill in weaving textual analysis and contextual research into a rich and suggestive argument about the boundaries of human sympathy, the tradition of realism, and the ongoing ethical and ecological challenges raised by the nonhuman.