The Robert and Vineta Colby Scholarly Book Prize

The Colby Book Prize was endowed in 2006 in memory of Robert Colby by his wife, Vineta Colby, distinguished scholars and long-time members of RSVP. In 2011, following Vineta’s death, the Board of Directors of RSVP unanimously voted to re-name the prize to honor both Robert and Vineta Colby for their many fine contributions to the study of Victorian periodicals and their long commitment to RSVP.

The Colby Prize is intended to honor original book-length scholarship about Victorian periodicals and newspapers, of the kind that Robert and Vineta Colby themselves produced during their careers. The annual prize is awarded to a book published during the preceding year that most advances our understanding of the nineteenth-century British press. The winner receives a monetary award of up to $2,000 and is invited to speak at the following year’s RSVP conference. Please note that the monetary award is paid out in U.S. dollars. See the list of previous awardees below the eligibility guidelines.

Nominations accepted from 15 November through 31 January.

See our awards calendar for all relevant deadlines. Please note that deadlines are subject to change and if needed, will be announced via our social media channels promptly.

Nominating a Book

To nominate a book, complete the Colby Book Prize form between Nov. 15 (of the book publication year) and Jan. 31 (of the awarding year). The nominator will need to provide contact information for themselves and the author as well as information about the book itself.

Our 2022 Colby Book Prize Winner

Congratulations to our 2022 Colby Book Prize winner, Priti Joshi (University of Puget Sound) for her book, Empire News: The Anglo-Indian Press Writes India (SUNY Press, 2021)!

Empire News is a valuable, innovative and timely study that brings to life the circulations of English language newspapers published in mid-century India with an immaculate level of care and attention to archival detail. The book focalises both the global and the local and, in doing so, it compellingly illuminates the ways in which the empire was not a monolithic construct of the press, but an often contradictory space of competing voices, shaped by the journalistic need for copy, access to sources, and volatility in the business of press production.

The committee would also like to give an honourable mention to Alison Moulds’ Medical Identities and Print Culture, 1830s-1910s (Palgrave, 2021) as a highly impressive work of scholarship for an early career researcher. It engages with a wealth of medical periodicals to offer a richly detailed, carefully synthesised and sophisticated analysis of the formation of medical identities across nineteenth century periodical and literary culture.

Previous Colby Prize Winners

Our previous Colby Prize winners include:

• 2021 — Two awards:
  • Elizabeth Tilley, The Periodical Press in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Palgrave, 2020)
  • David Finkelstein, ed., The Edinburgh History of the British and Irish Press: Volume 2, Expansion and Evolution, 1800-1900 (Edinburgh UP, 2020)
• 2020 — Thomas Smits, The European Illustrated Press and The Emergence of a Transnational Visual Culture of the News, 1842-1870 (Routledge, 2019)
  • Honorable mentions: Iain Crawford, Contested Liberalisms: Martineau, Dickens and the Victorian Press (Edinburgh University Press, 2019); and Alexis Easley, Clare Gill, and Beth Rodgers, Women, Periodicals, and Print Culture in Britain, 1830s -1900s: The Victorian Period, part of The Edinburgh History of Women’s Periodical Culture in Britain (Edinburgh University Press, 2019)
• 2019 — Andrew Hobbs, A Fleet Street in Every Town: The Provincial Press in England, 1855-1900 (OpenBook, 2018)
• 2018 — Alexis Easley, Andrew King, and John Morton (eds.), Researching the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press: Case Studies (Routledge, 2017)
• 2017 — Andrew King, Alexis Easley, and John Morton (eds.), The Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals and Newspapers (Routledge, 2016)
• 2016 — Mary Shannon, Dickens, Reynolds, and Mayhew on Wellington Street: The Print Culture of a Victorian Street (Routledge, 2015)
• 2015 — Caroline Bressey,  Empire, Race and the Politics of Anti-Caste (Bloomsbury, 2014)
  • Honorable mention: Martin Hewitt, The Dawn of the Cheap Press in Victorian Britain: The End of the ‘Taxes on Knowledge,’ 1849-1869 (Bloomsbury, 2014)
• 2014 — Two awards:
  • Fionnuala Dillane, Before George Eliot: Marian Evans and the Periodical Press (Cambridge University Press, 2013)
  • David Latané, William Maginn and the British Press: A Critical Biography (Ashgate, 2013)
• 2013 — Two awards:
  • Aileen Fyfe, Steam-Powered Knowledge: William Chambers and the Business of Publishing, 1820-1860 (Chicago University Press, 2012)
  • Robert Patten, Charles Dickens and “Boz”: The Birth of the Industrial Age Author (Cambridge University Press, 2012)
• 2012 — Joel Wiener, The Americanization of the British Press, 1830s-1914 (Palgrave, 2011)
• 2011 — Patrick Leary, The Punch Brotherhood: Table Talk and Print Culture in Mid-Victorian London (British Library, 2010)
• 2010 — Two awards:
  • Mark Schoenfield, British Periodicals and Romantic Identity (Macmillan, 2008)
  • Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor (eds.), The Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism (Academia and the British Library, 2009)
• 2009 — Catherine Waters, Commodity Culture in Dickens’s Household Words: The Social Life of Goods (Ashgate, 2008)
• 2008 — Kathryn Ledbetter, Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals: Commodities in Context (Ashgate, 2007)
• 2007 — David Finkelstein, Print Culture and the Blackwood Tradition, 1805-1930 (University of Toronto Press, 2005)
• 2006 — Two awards:
  • Linda Hughes, Graham R.: Rosamund Mariott Watson, Woman of Letters (Ohio University Press, 2005)
  • Peter Morton, The Busiest Man in London: Grant Allen and the Writing Trade, 1875-1900 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005)