The RSVP 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. Submissions for this prize should do at least one of the following:
- Deepen our understanding of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) founders, editors, contributors, and readers of periodicals
- Interrogate Anglocentric perspectives
- Enact anti-racist or anti-colonial values
- Consider the cultural impact of the British Empire around the world
The annual awardee will receive $500 and publication of their article in Victorian Periodicals Review. A list of past awardees can be found below our submission guidelines.
Applications open May 1 and are due June 15.
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.
Submission Guidelines
Essays should be approximately 4,000–7,500 words (or 15–25 pages), excluding notes and bibliography. Formatting should be double-spaced throughout with one-inch margins and a standard font such as Times New Roman, size 12. Please also note:
- Graduate students, independent scholars, and faculty of all ranks are eligible submit their work.
- Manuscripts should not be under submission elsewhere or previously published.
- Submissions should be emailed as an MS Word attachment.
Please email submissions directly to the VPR editor.
Previous Awardees
The 2023 Expanding the Field Prize goes to Tarini Bhamburkar (University of Bristol) for her essay “Victorian Feminist Periodicals and the ‘New Indian Woman’: Indian Feminism and Indian Women’s Interviews in Women’s Penny Paper and the Woman’s Signal.” The committee noted, “This is a polished and lucid essay that quite clearly meets the brief of the Expanding the Field prize.” It offers “a fascinating account of the ways in which the Women’s Penny Paper and Woman’s Signal articulated a transnational vision of feminism by integrating profiles of Indian feminist activists.” Furthermore, the essay “illuminates the dialectic between the White British editor/writer’s positioning of the interview subjects and the subjects’ own self-fashioning in a satisfyingly nuanced way.”
Previous winners of the VanArsdel Prize are:
- 2022 — Sourav Chatterjee, “Against Imitation: Anticolonial Caricatures in Basantak or the Bengali Punch”