Competitions and Prizes

INCS awards two essay prizes and several travel grants each year:

  • The Richard Stein Essay Prize
  • The Susan Morgan Graduate Student Essay Prize
  • The Chris Vanden Bossche Graduate Student Travel Award

The Richard Stein Essay Prize

The INCS Essay Prize, originally established in 2003, was named the Richard Stein Essay Prize in 2017 in honor of Richard Stein, Professor Emeritus at the University of Oregon, for his role as a principal founder of INCS and for his long and crucial service to developing and nurturing our organization. In 1985 he recognized something we now take for granted: the need for a collaborative organization devoted to the interdisciplinary study of the nineteenth century. His books and articles as well as his teaching at Harvard, Berkeley, and Oregon have focused on the connections among Victorian literature, visual culture, and other arts. Some publications include Victoria’s Year: English Literature and Culture, 1837-1838 (Oxford University Press, 1987); The Ritual of Interpretation: The Fine Arts as Literature in Ruskin, Rossetti, and Pater (Harvard University Press, 1975); “Illustrating Bleak House” in Approaches to Teaching Dickens’s Bleak House, ed. John Jordan and Gordon Bigelow (MLA, 2008); “National Portraits,” in Victorian Prism, ed. James Buzard, Joseph Childers & Eileen Gillooly (University of Virginia Press, 2007);  “John Ruskin,” in the Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literary History (2006); “Dickens and Illustration,” in The Cambridge Companion to Dickens, ed. John Jordan (Cambridge University Press, 2001).

This $500 prize recognizes excellence in interdisciplinary scholarship on any nineteenth-century topic. We encourage INCS members to submit their own work and to nominate essays written by other scholars of the nineteenth-century. To be eligible for the prize, authors must be current members of INCS. If potential contestants are not current members of INCS, they may become members at the time that they apply for the prize. Membership is always for the calendar year.

The winning essay and runner up will be announced in late October or early November, 2024, and celebrated at the 2025 INCS conference in Genoa, Italy. In addition to the $500 prize, the winner of the Stein prize be invited to assemble a panel for the 2025 meeting.

Please send a copy of the nominated essay (pdf preferred) to Professor Nancy Rose Marshall, University of Wisconsin, at [email protected]. The 2024 Stein Prize deadline is July 15, 2024. In the case of an essay that appeared only online, a durable link is acceptable in lieu of a pdf. Click for more info: INCS Stein Prize Announcement 2024

Guidelines and Eligibility Rules for the Competition

  • Only current INCS members are eligible for the current competition. Membership is for the calendar year.
  • Articles that appeared in print in a journal or collection in the relevant year are eligible. If the date of publication is not in that year, but the article appeared in that year, it is eligible. Essays published in online, peer-reviewed journals are considered to be “in print,” and are thus eligible.
  • The essay must make a significant contribution to the field of nineteenth-century studies.
  • Current INCS board members are not eligible for this competition.
  • Former INCS board members are not eligible until five years have elapsed since their board service.
  • Scholars who are not yet INCS members but wish to have their essays considered may join INCS for the year of the essay’s nomination up until approximately a week before judging commences.

Specific questions about the 2025 Richard Stein Essay Prize may be directed to Professor Nancy Rose Marshall, University of Wisconsin, [email protected].

INCS Stein Prize 2024

Winner: Alexander Bubb, “Which Translation?: Identifying the True Source of Patten Wilson’s Shahnameh Illustrations.” Volupté: Interdisciplinary Journal of Decadence Studies, vol. 6, no. 1 (2023), pp. 98-119.

Scholars have long recognized that an orientalist fascination with the literatures and cultures of Asia exerted a powerful influence over nineteenth-century European culture. Bubb’s “Which Translation?” uses an admirably nuanced and methodical investigation into the history of translations between Persian and English episodes from the epic poem Shahnameh to rewrite our sense of the particular channels of such cross-cultural exchanges. In the process, the article forcefully demonstrates how scholars have given too much credit to canonical writers in their accounts of global literary traffic, erasing significant figures from literary history and unintentionally replicating the very colonial power structures they seek to question. Through a close comparative reading of English renditions of the tale of Sohrab and Rustem, their Persian sources, and the fin-de-siècle illustrations they inspired, Bubb compellingly shows that the artist Patten Wilson drew not on Mathew Arnold’s well-known rendition of the poem, but rather on the work of the popularizer Helen Zimmern as the source material for illustrations Wilson published in The Yellow Book. The article’s impressive attention to the overlooked details of translation at once helps to rehabilitate the reputation of a marginalized woman writer and drives home the need for a methodological shift in cross-cultural literary history, a shift that entails looking past conventional notions of literary significance to de-center the European canon and counteract the enduring power structures of imperialism.

Runner Up: Lindsay Wells, “Tobacco for the Flower Garden: Plant Collecting and Plantation Crops in Nineteenth-Century Britain.” Literature Compass, e12705 (2023), https://doi.org/10.1111/lic3.12705.

Lindsay Wells’s “Tobacco for the Flower Garden” examines the abundant literary and visual archive of plant collection in nineteenth-century Britain to underscore what is missing from these depictions of agricultural specimens imported from the far reaches of the empire: an honest reckoning with the realities of plantation slavery. Reading textual accounts alongside images drawn from both commercial and botanical sources on tobacco, the article shows how an aestheticized, intellectualized treatment of tobacco’s horticultural interest and beauty made it possible to circumvent difficult conversations about Britain’s ongoing entanglement with economies founded on the labor of enslaved peoples. Wells’s eloquent investigation of the gaps and silences in such discourse highlights the role that gardening and plant collecting played in the domestication of colonialist ideology, opening up space for further work into the ways the representation of the nonhuman in the nineteenth century could have serious repercussions for the naturalization of human beings’ mistreatment of one another.

Stein Prize Committee 2024: John MacNeill Miller (Chair), Ginger Frost, and Nick Wolters.

The Susan Morgan Graduate Student Essay Prize

The Susan Morgan Graduate Student Essay Prize prize was established in honor of Susan Morgan, Distinguished Professor of English at Miami University, a prolific, interdisciplinary scholar of nineteenth-century literature and culture, and a longstanding member of INCS. Professor Morgan’s scholarship has shaped the interdisciplinary fields of women’s writing, travel writing, and empire studies—fields that are central to the work of many INCS scholars—and she has generously mentored countless graduate students and junior colleagues. Her selected publications include In the Meantime: Character and Perception in Jane Austen’s Fiction (Chicago, 1980); Sisters in Time: Imagining Gender in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Oxford, 1989); Place Matters: Gendered Geography in Victorian Women’s Travel Writings about Southeast Asia (Rutgers, 1996); and Bombay Anna: The Real Story and Remarkable Adventures of the King and I Governess (California, 2008).

Guidelines and Eligibility Rules

  • The Susan Morgan prize is awarded annually, following each annual INCS conference. Papers will be evaluated by a panel of judges appointed by the INCS board.
  • Eligible essays are by graduate student members of INCS and must be presented for discussion by the author at the INCS conference. Submissions may not exceed the length of 4,000 words (excluding notes, works cited, and translations). Essays over the word length will not be considered. Citation style should follow one of the usual humanities formats, usually Chicago or MLA.
  • Essays are evaluated in their conference form. In other words, no additional revisions, expansions, or corrections are permitted following the submission of papers to the conference committee for posting on the conference site. Papers will be removed from the conference website for judging by the panel of judges following the conference.
  • For 2019 and beyond, graduate students must designate the wish to have their papers considered for the prize by checking the appropriate box on the conference paper submission portal.
  • Decisions will be announced each year during the fall semester that follows the conference, which is usually staged during the spring semester.
  • The award is $500. The winner will also be invited to submit an expanded version of the paper to Nineteenth-Century Contexts, the INCS-affiliated peer-reviewed journal.
  • The second-place paper will be awarded the designation “Honorable Mention.”
  • Papers submitted after the due date for conference papers cannot be considered for the prize. The due date will be determined each year by the conference organizer.
  • No judge will be permitted to assess his or her own work or to assess work submitted by anyone with whom the judge has worked closely.
  • INCS reserves the right to award no prize in any given year.

Susan Morgan Prize 2024

Winner: Evan Horne, “Transmedial Signification in Turner”

In J. M. W. Turner’s “Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus” (1829), Evan Horne contends that the meaning of the painting depends on the viewer’s reading of its title and verbal elements. Without the title, Horne asks, would a viewer even know the painting represented the Homeric scene at all? The two titular figures of Odysseus and Polyphemus are impossible to identify. All one sees is a ship sailing away from an island, its prow of horses and sea nymphs cutting through the water. Horne points out that the ship’s flags provide visual and verbal signs – to an attentive reader and viewer – of Odysseus’s heroic insistence on defiant self expression. Yet why does Turner confuse the issue by using the hero’s name as it appears in Virgil? Why is the name left visually incomplete in the flag, leaving it to the viewer to fill in the blank? As Horne’s deft analysis shows, Turner’s use of transmedial elements offers us the simultaneity of the figure of Odysseus as both duplicitous villain and Homeric champion – but only if we read the visual and verbal as mediating each other. To understand the painting fully, we must read and interpret the verbal cues against what we already know as readers of Homer and the Virgil, and then bring that to bear on the painting’s visual elements. Turner is thereby able to decenter the human even in a painting about two larger-than-life characters by relying on the viewer’s gaze to read the visual and verbal together for the full meaning of the work.

Honorable Mention #1: Riley Wilkins, ”The Transgender Jane Austen”

For transgender readers facing societal prejudice in the present, Riley Wilkins finds an unlikely ally in beloved novelist Jane Austen, whose novels sympathetically portray the consciousness of socially marginalized characters. Drawing on the discourses of cognitive linguistics, narratology, and trans studies, Wilkins explores Austen’s mastery of free indirect discourse, a “trans-narrative form” that resists binary identification with author or character alone. The essay presents a memorable reading of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, whose heroine Anne Elliot “stands against her family’s and society’s negative perspectives” on her personal worth and social value, “but ultimately banishes their impact on her mind and attains stronger belief in herself.” In her depiction of friendship between the spinster Anne and the invalid Mrs. Smith, Austen gives readers a model for creating a “community of outsiders.” Making an impassioned case for the continued relevance of Austen’s novels to readers facing personal and political struggles, Wilkins persuasively argues that loving literary characters can teach us how to care for others and ourselves.

Honorable Mention #2: Hannah Schultz, “‘My Heart is Too Thoroughly Dried to be Broken’: Preserved Desires in Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall”

This polished reading of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall skillfully weaves together a close reading of the botanical metaphors in the text with larger questions of gender and agency. Most impressively, it argues that the use of botanical metaphors in the novel offer a vision of a more egalitarian relationship through their connection to differing visions of temporality.  Rather than conflating women and nature, Schultz argues, the text contrasts “hothouse” time and its “consumptive, accelerated, or stunted temporalities” with a model of natural time that privileges long-term growth and stability. In doing so, Schultz complicates the botanical metaphors that we have all become accustomed to seeing in nineteenth-century depictions of gender, suggesting that beyond Ruskinian paeans to separate spheres, these tropes alluded to varying visions of chronotypes and human control.

Susan Morgan Prize Committee 2024: Sumangala Bhattacharya and Kirsten Andersen

Chris Vanden Bossche Graduate Student Travel Award

The Chris Vanden Bossche Graduate Student Travel Award was established in honor of Chris Vanden Bossche, the long-term and beloved Executive Director of INCS. Professor Vanden Bossche taught for many years at the University of Notre Dame, where he specialized in Victorian fiction and non-fiction prose. In 2014, he published a study of Victorian conceptions of how to produce social change entitled Reform Acts: Chartism, Social Agency, and the Victorian Novel, 1832-1867 (Johns Hopkins University Press). His many essays have dealt with family and class as represented in cookery books and David Copperfield, separate spheres and social reform in Ruskin, the idea of authorship in the copyright debates of 1837-1842, and “coming of age” in Victorian literature and culture. In addition, he has published essays on Tennyson, Scott, and other nineteenth-century subjects. He is also the author of a study of the intersections of political and literary authority, Carlyle and the Search for Authority (Ohio State University Press) and editor of Thomas Carlyle’s Historical Essays and Past and Present.

The Travel Award named after Professor Vanden Bossche provides small grants for graduate students to attend the annual INCS conference. Preference is generally given to students who must travel the farthest. For more information on the Chris Vanden Bossche Graduate Student Travel Award, please contact INCS Treasurer Abigail Mann.

Donations

To make a tax-deductible donation in support of any of these prizes, please click the “Donate” button below and indicate the name of the prize in the “Add comments to seller” field. Many thanks!