Established in 2021, Victorian Periodicals Review‘s Expanding the Field Prize was created in part as a response to the wider movement to “unsettle” Victorian studies and expand its scope beyond a Western, White canonical focus. It is awarded annually for an outstanding essay that diversifies the existing geographic, racial, and ethnic composition of nineteenth-century periodical studies.
Previous winners of the VPR Expanding the Field Prize are listed below, along with links to their published articles (as available).
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2024
Nilkantha Pal
“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.”
2023
Tarini Bhamburkar
“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.”
2022
Sourav Chatterjee
“Against Imitation: Anticolonial Caricatures in Basantak or the Bengali Punch”
The committee writes, “This essay contributes to periodical studies in precisely the way this prize seeks to reward. The scope of research and scholarship is impressive, as the author’s argument and methodology de-center whiteness and advocate for a complex understanding of periodicals in India beyond the Anglocentric periodicals more commonly studied.”