2024 VPR Prize Winners Announced!
We are delighted to announce the winners of the 2024 VPR Prizes!
Expanding the Field into Indian Children’s Periodicals
This year’s Expanding the Field Prize goes to Nilkantha Pal (Indian Institute of Science Education and Research) for his essay “Imagining Childhood in Colonial Bengal: Children’s Periodicals, Readership, and Vernacular Publishing, ca. 1880-1920.”
This work impressed the judges “with its erudition, its broad scope of reference, and its nuanced application of Robert Darnton’s circulation model of print culture to a colonial context.” The Expanding the Field Prize is awarded annually for an outstanding essay that diversifies the existing geographic, racial, and ethnic composition of nineteenth-century periodical studies.
Our 2024 VanArsdel Prize Winner
The winner of this year’s VanArsdel Prize is Adele Guyton (KU Leuven) for her essay “‘A Certain Amount of Scientific Education’: Science, Sensation, and the Everyman Narrator in the Serialised War of the Worlds (1897).”
The committee noted, “This is a strong piece of work with a clearly focused and sustained argument that uses periodical studies to make an interesting contribution to readings of the novel and rethinks assumptions regarding class and readerly subjectivity.” The VanArsdel Prize is awarded annually to the best graduate student essay investigating Victorian periodicals and newspapers. The prize was established in 1990 to honor Rosemary VanArsdel, a founding member of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals whose groundbreaking research continues to shape the field of nineteenth-century periodical studies.
Stay Tuned to See These Articles in Print
Congratulations to the prize winners, who will each receive a $500 award and publication in an upcoming issue of Victorian Periodicals Review, and thank you to everyone who submitted an essay. We had a strong pool of submissions, and we especially want to thank this year’s judges, Carolyn Betensky and Flore Janssen, for their careful reading and generous feedback.