William and Mary Burgan Prize Winners

2019 — Claire Landes (Texas Christian University), “The (Im)material Feud: Dickens and Elliotson v. Crowe and Martineau”; Aaron Long (University of Kansas), “Biomimicry and Biopower in Jules Verne’s Nautilus“

• Honorable Mention: Heather Asbeck (University of Missouri–Columbia), “‘The Fresh, Unsullied Satin of the Bag’: Privacy, Violation, and Coercive Control in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley”

2018 — Kyle Barton (University of Iowa), “Diagnosing the Monologue: Form as Symptom of Post-Crimean Trauma”; Kate Nesbit (University of Iowa), “Rest and the Resistant Listener: Reading Husbands and Snoring Wives in Late Victorian Literature”

2017 — Rachelle Stinson (York University), “Nostalgic Graffiti: Writing on the University” 

• Honorable Mention: Brett Beasley (Loyola University), “‘My Taste Was Me’: Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Bitter Taste of Being”

2016 — Grace Stevens (Loyola University), “‘In Earnest or in Jest’: the Graphic Serialization of Tess of the D’Urbervilles as a Commentary on Censorship”

2015 — Lindsay Wells (University of Wisconsin–Madison), “The Sensual Use of Color in D. G. Rossetti’s Venus Veritcordia”

• Honorable Mention: Shannon Draucker (Boston University), “Acoustical Power and the Folk World in Hardy’s The Return of the Native”

2014 — Ruth M. McAdams (University of Michigan–Ann Arbor), “Napoleonic History on the Surface in Vanity Fair and The Trumpet-Major”

• Honorable Mention: Jessica Queener (West Virginia University), “Violence and British Identity in Yokohama’s Expatriate Community: Charles Wirgman’s Japan Punch, 1862-1876”

2013 — Michelle Taylor (University of Iowa), “God Spelled Backwards: Dog as Divinity in Michael Field’s ‘Whym Chow: Flame of Love'”

2012 — Lee Anne Bache (Indiana University–Bloomington), “Properties of the Self: Aurora Leigh, Intellectual Property, and Women’s Autobiography”

2011 — Laura Golobish (University of Georgia), “Building a Pocket Cathedral”

2010 — Alisha R. Walters (University of Toronto), “Racial Diversity and British Nationality in Wilkie Collins’s Armadale” and Joseph Stubenrauch (Indiana University), “Evangelical Geographies: Religious Tourism and Souvenirs in Early Victorian Britain”

2009 — Jennifer Warfel Juszkiewicz (Notre Dame), “The Iron Library: Victorian England and the Creation of the British Institution”

2008 — Philip Steer (Duke University), “Guerrillas in the Midst: Settler Colonization and the British Invasion Novel”

2007 — Kimberly Hereford (University of Washington), “G.F. Watts’ Female Portraits and the Grosvenor Gallery: A Union of Style and Symbolism”

2006 — Teresa Huffman Traver (Notre Dame), “When Autobiography Does Theology: Development in Newman’s Apologia”

2005 — Marty Gould (University of Iowa), “Around the World in 80 Plays: Drama and Empire in the Nineteenth Century”

2003 — Marty Gould (University of Iowa), “Rational, National Show: The Theatrical Career of the Great Exhibition”

2002 — Sara L. Maurer (Indiana University), “Redefining the Bounds of Property, Re-enforcing the Borders of Empire: Ulster Custom, ‘Ancient Law’, and the Land Act of 1870”

2001 — Sarah Heidt (Cornell University), “Executing Autobiographies: The Case of John Addington Symonds and Margaret Oliphant”