This Year’s Winner!
2025 — Mercedes Sheldon (University of Minnesota, Twin Cities), “Survival of the Fittest: Grant Allen’s Evolution from Scientist to Celebrity Writer”
2025 Burgan Prize winner Mercedes Sheldon accepts the award from MVSA President Laura Kasson Fiss (right) and Vice President Dallas Liddle (left).
2024 — Colten Biro (Saint Louis University), “Forming Alice by Formatting the Page: The Little Leather Library Edition of Alice in Wonderland“
2023 — Marissa Knaak (Michigan State University), “Mourning and the Annual Sale: Sheffield’s Department Stores and Queen Victoria’s Death”
2022 — Sara Loy (Indiana University), “Performing Adulthood: Embodiment in Children’s Theater”; Joshua Rawleigh (Indiana University), “’Remember the country and age in which we live’: Reading the Post-Secular in Northanger Abbey“
2021 — Jordan Bunzel (Indiana University), “Trick of the Eye: Optical Illusion as Education in Jude the Obscure“
Honorable Mention: Maddison McGann (University of Iowa), “Writing the Line: Railway Fiction and the Industrialization of Nineteenth-Century Print”
2020 — not awarded due to pandemic-related conference cancellation
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”