News and Announcements

Feel free to share news and announcements of interest to the INCS membership by sending an email with the subject heading “INCS Website” to the INCS Webmaster Nicole Lobdell ([email protected]). Please provide summary information as below (nature of announcement, title, place, dates, deadline) and include a URL pointing toward a more comprehensive outline of the relevant information.

Prize: The Richard Stein Essay Prize 2025 / Deadline 15 July 2025

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.

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 both to submit their own work and to nominate essays written by other scholars of the nineteenth-century; essays must have been published in some form during the calendar year of 2024. 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: [email protected].

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.

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 (2024) 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, at: [email protected]

(Richard Stein Essay Prize 2025 PDF)

Call for Papers: Victorians Institute 2025 / Deadline extended to May 31, 2025

September 13-14 2025, Furman University, Greenville, SC

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Sharon Marcus, Orlando Harriman Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University

Conference Website: https://vi2025.wordpress.com>/span>

Victorian Studies: Who Cares?

As we confront the intersecting and immediate threats of climate crisis, economic precarity, structural inequality, and political extremism, the academic humanities may at first appear removed from the concrete and pressing problems facing modern citizens. We ask why, and how, we continue to care about a historically-focused discipline such as Victorian Studies. We invite both those papers that explore cultures of care (or withholding of empathy) within the Victorian era, and those that articulate how our discipline can contribute ethical responses to the practical challenges that face our campus communities. We seek to provoke constructive dialogues on a range of scholarly, pedagogy, and disciplinary topics, which may include:

  • Victorian regimes of public care and control (philanthropy, public health, missionary work, etc)
  • Orphanages, workhouses, and the illusion of care
  • Imperial projects and the discourse of uplift in assimilation
  • Housekeeping, food preparation, and domestic practices of care
  • Modes of extending or withholding empathy in Victorian culture (animal welfare discourse and animal use, environmentalism and conservation, care for impacts of industrialism on future generations, middle-class extension or withholding of compassion for the working class and poor, etc)
  • Literary representations of empathy, compassion, and practical care work
  • Narrative and poetic strategies that engender or preclude empathy
  • Why we should care about out-of-print and non-canonical authors
  • Care and the present-day work of pedagogy and university administration (emotional labor in academia, teaching difficult topics with care, confronting economic precarity of students and colleagues, faculty solidarity as a form of mutual care, university obligations of care toward employees)
  • Pedagogical strategies to ethically develop student investment in Victorian Studies as a field
  • Obligations of Victorian Studies, and the academic humanities more broadly, to engage ethical and practical problems within our discipline and beyond our campuses (activism, public-facing research, promoting critical thinking, citizenship, and awareness of history)

Please send abstract of no more than 300 words and brief CV to [email protected] by May 31, 2025. Presentations should be 15-20 minutes in length. Undergraduates are invited to submit to separate undergraduate panel (using same e-mail address); please send abstract of 300 words or less accompanied by brief bio instead of standard academic CV. Questions may be addressed to the conference e-mail address (above) or directly to Dr. Gretchen Braun at [email protected]

Call for Volunteers / Like to Read Victorian Serial Novels? / “Project Endings” / Deadline: 30 June 2025

Please join Helena Michie, Robyn Warhol and Huw Edwards-Evans in a new, crowdsourced study of Victorian serial novels. For “Project Endings,” we are seeking volunteers to look at the strategies novelists used for ending serial parts and for connecting them to the beginnings of the next parts. They used cliffhangers, you say? We were surprised to discover that this well known fact is not true. Cliffhangers are rare in Victorian serial fiction! So what did novelists do to keep their readers coming back, month after month, to see what happens next?

If you volunteer to help with this “medium data” study (it’s not “big data” because no computer application could do the required analysis), we will ask you to:

  • Read one Victorian novel in its original serial parts (which can be easily accessed at Reading Like a Victorian: [email protected] );
  • Read through the Project Endings Code Book, which lists the strategies for ending and beginning that we have so far observed;
  • Fill out a simple Google form for each part of your serial novel and return the forms to us.
  • If you notice a strategy that isn’t already on the form, we ask that you flag it so we can add it to our taxonomy.

We will send you a list of some 200 novels that are as-yet unspoken for and ask you to list your top three choices. We will do our best to accommodate your preference.

No special knowledge of Victorian literature is required. Our volunteers include recreational readers as well as scholars, researchers, and students. The timeframe for completing the task begins now and ends June 30, 2025.

Any questions? Feel free to email Robyn ([email protected]) or Helena ([email protected]) and ask.

If you are ready to volunteer, please email Huw Edwardes-Evans at [email protected]. Huw will enroll you in the project and send you the list of novels that are still available, along with instructions for the task.

We look forward to hearing from you and learning from your participation!

Invitation to Volunteer for Project Endings (PDF)

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.

INCS Susan Morgan Graduate Essay 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

CFP Victorian Poetry / “Poetry’s Parts” Keyword Series / Deadline: rolling

Victorian Poetry is pleased to announce a new keyword series called “Poetry’s Parts.” We invite proposals for short keyword essays (ca. 1,100 – 1,300 words) exploring Victorian poetry’s parts, whether formal (“sonnet”) or figural (“apostrophe”), cultural (“cosmopolitan”) or critical (“lyricization”). Considered and published on an ongoing basis (as opposed to appearing in a designated special issue), essays should apprehend pressing conceptual, aesthetic, historical, cultural, political, archival, and / or methodological questions and problems that shape the field (or, alternatively, that have been neglected to the field’s detriment). As warranted, authors might also consider the ways the field (as revealed by the keyword under discussion) is animated by or animates other (sub)disciplines or genealogies of thought in ways recognized or unrecognized.

Keywords need not be limited to those that fall strictly within the specialist purview of Victorian poetry. For instance, essays exploring the resonances of broad concepts such as “atmosphere” or “race” as refracted distinctively by and through Victorian poetry (broadly construed) are most welcome. Because these essays should make arguments as opposed to offering handbook-style overviews, proposals revisiting keywords explored in prior issues will eventually be accepted as the series unfolds. Pedagogical discussion may be appropriate if it serves an illustrative purpose that keeps in view the series’ focus.

Proposals are subject to editorial review (with an eye toward giving deliberate shape to the series, especially in its early stages) and keyword essays to peer review. If contemporaneous appearance in print is necessary for offering substantive insight, the editor will consider joint proposals (ideally, featuring scholars of different ranks and affiliations, on and off the tenure track), whether on the same keyword from quite distinct vantages or on different but productively entangled keywords. Joint proposals should be limited to two or three scholars, as larger groups are difficult to accommodate in print outside the confines of a special issue. Direct queries and proposals to the editor at [email protected].