2026 — Kathleen McGowan (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), “Exploring a Concealed Rossetti Song Setting in the Music of Jane Joseph”
2025 — Mercedes Sheldon (University of Minnesota, Twin Cities), “Survival of the Fittest: Grant Allen’s Evolution from Scientist to Celebrity Writer”
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”