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 2025, and celebrated at the 2026 joint INCS/INCSA/NCSA conference in Washington, DC (July 21-24). In addition to the $500 prize, the winner of the Stein prize will be invited to assemble a panel for the 2026 meeting.

Please send a copy of the nominated essay (.pdf preferred) to Professor Nancy Rose Marshall, University of Wisconsin, at: marshallnancyrose@gmail.com.

The 2025 Stein Prize deadline is July 15, 2025. In the case of an essay that appeared only online, a durable link is acceptable in lieu of a .pdf. Click for more info: Richard Stein Essay Prize 2025

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, marshallnancyrose@gmail.com.

INCS Stein Prize 2025

Winner: Sebastian Egholm Lund, “The Climate of Utopia: Victorian Hothouses and H. G. Wells.” Victorian Studies, vol. 65, no. 4, 2023, pp. 618-39. Project MUSE, https://dx.doi.org/10.2979/vic.00044. (While official date of publication is 2023, the article did not appear until 2024.)

Sebastian Egholm Lund’s article, “The Climate of Utopia: Victorian Hothouses and H.G. Wells,” is a superb work of ecocritical literary scholarship. Lund’s persuasive argument unfolds in compelling prose, elucidating the Victorian techno-utopian hubris of envisioning an Edenic planetary hothouse, while forging connections with the unsettling prospect of solar geoengineering as a response to climate change today. Grounded in expert historical research and perceptive textual analysis, Lund focuses on the writings of Wells, particularly The Time Machine (1895), as well as the more obscure short story “The Flowering of the Strange Orchid” (1894). From the Wardian case to the Crystal Palace, Lund contextualizes Wells’s visions of climate engineering within “the metaphoric paradox of the hothouse,” in which the Victorian era both instigated catastrophic climate change through exponential increases in atmospheric carbon emissions, and simultaneously envisioned an ideal future of anthropogenic technological environmental manipulation. Timely and thought-provoking, Lund suggests the limitations of planetary climate engineering, as foreshadowed by Wells and as manifested in the current climate crisis.

Runner Up: Winter Jade Werner, “The Hikayat Abdullah, the Missionary Press, and the Making of Nineteenth-Century ‘World Literature.’” Comparative Literature, vol. 76, no, 4, 2024, pp. 451–71. https://doi.org/10.1215/00104124-11316397.

The Richard Stein Essay Prize Honorable Mention for 2025 is awarded to Winter Jade Werner for “The Hikayat Abdullah, the Missionary Press, and the Making of Nineteenth-Century ‘World Literature,'” published in Comparative Literature. Deeply researched, theoretically informed, and analytically sharp, this essay uses the historians’ tool of microhistory to understand an intriguing nineteenth-century literary encounter involving Abdullah bin Abdel Kadir, known as the father of Malay Literature. Casting her eye beyond this microhistory, Werner entertains larger questions about the category of the literary and the notion of the nation. Even in a secularizing epoch, she locates religious institutions and religious practices at the heart of the making of world literature as a field.

Stein Prize Committee 2025: Lara Kriegel, Holly Case, and Andrea Rager.

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 2025

Winner: Michele Brugnetti, Sapienza University of Rome / University of Silesia in Katowice, “A New Form for a New Crisis: the emergence of the novel-essay and the case of Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean“

In his concise, suggestive, and well-researched paper, Michele Brugnetti makes a strong case for reading Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean (1884) as a signal contribution to the fin-de-siècle European tradition of the novel-essay. Drawing on Stefano Ercolino’s theorization of the novel-essay in continental literature, Brugnetti convincingly argues that Pater’s reimagination of the Bildungsroman around processes of aesthetic reflection was more than just an ornamental, gratuitous suspension of narrative action. Instead, Pater experimentally combined the Bildungsroman with the novel-essay to explore how aesthetic reflection could play a constitutive role in the unfolding of plot and the development of individual character. “In a moment defined by acceleration, fragmentation, and the collapse of inherited certainties,” Brugnetti suggests, “Pater stages in Marius the Epicurean a radically inward turn: it explores how perception, shaped by prior texts and aesthetic encounters, inhabits tension—seeking, through the interpenetration of essay and novel, a form provisional enough to reflect a self continuously in the act of becoming.” (8) The committee was particularly impressed by the breadth of Brugnetti’s engagement with the Paterian source material and his meaningful dialogue with scholarship related to the pan-European decadent novel.

Honorable Mention: Rebecca Sheppard, University of British Columbia, “Poisoned Thought and Circulatory Collapse in George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil“

What happens to a body or a mind when emotions are bottled and blood does not circulate as it should? How might the language of nineteenth-century affect and circulatory theory unveil heretofore hidden valences in the pathologized characters inhabiting the world of George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil? Rebecca Sheppard’s insightful and witty essay proposes answers to these questions, arguing that Eliot’s novella “exposes what happens when circulation, meant to sustain life through constant renewal, no longer functions healthily. […] Eliot encodes this failure in the language of pressure, blockage, and accumulated strain” (6). The prize committee found the interdisciplinary nature of the essay to be particularly noteworthy. Sheppard convincingly deploys Victorian-era medical literature in her attentive close readings of The Lifted Veil to conclude that the structure of Eliot’s novella itself, much like that of the pathologies ailing Latimer, offers the “physiological and narrative inversion” of an “acceleration [that] defines the dominant logic of modern life” (13).

Susan Morgan Prize Committee 2025: Nick Wolters, Matthew Skwiat and John MacNeill Miller.

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.

INCS offers the opportunity to apply for the Chris Vanden Bossche Graduate Student Travel Award, which provides modest grants (up to $250) for graduate students to attend the annual INCS conference.

Our goal with these grants is to increase access for as many students as possible, so funds will be awarded on a rolling basis this year: we will begin accepting applications after conference acceptances are sent out (anticipated for December 2025 for the 2026 joint INCS/NCSA/INCSA conference). All recipients must be INCS members.

To apply, simply send your name, affiliation, and confirmation of acceptance to incsmoney@gmail.com. We will notify those who receive the funding as soon as possible. Chris Vanden Bossche awards are disbursed immediately after the conference, upon receipt of documentation: if travel costs (flight, mileage. public transportation, parking) do not reach $250, we will reimburse up to the amount of travel costs incurred.

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!