The Nineteenth Century Studies Association is pleased to announce the Emerging Scholars Award. The work of emerging scholars represents the promise and long-term future of interdisciplinary scholarship in nineteenth century studies. In recognition of the excellent publications of this constituency of emerging scholars, this award recognizes an outstanding article or essay published during the author’s doctoral studies or within the six years following conferral of a doctorate. The winning article will be selected by a committee of nineteenth-century scholars representing diverse disciplines. The winner will receive $500 to be presented at the annual NCSA Conference. NCSA encourages winners to attend the annual conference and will waive the conference registration fee. (Winners have to become NCSA members, but will be provided with a coupon during the conference registration period.)
Eligibility
Entries can be from any discipline and may focus on any aspect of the long nineteenth century (the French Revolution to World War I), must be published in English or be accompanied by an English translation, and must be by a single author. Submission of essays that are interdisciplinary is especially encouraged.
Entries can be from any discipline, must be published in English or be accompanied by an English translation, and submission of essays that are interdisciplinary is especially encouraged. Articles that appeared in print in a journal or edited collection in 2023 or between January 1, 2024 and June 30, 2024 are eligible for the 2025 Emerging Scholars Award, which will be presented at the 2025 NCSA Conference in New Orleans. (If the official date of publication does not fall within that span but the work in fact appeared between those dates, then it is eligible.)
Essays published in online, peer-reviewed journals are considered to be “in print” and are thus eligible. The first format in which an article is published, whether print or online is considered to be the official publication date.
Articles may be submitted by the author or the publisher of a journal, anthology, or volume containing independent essays.
Articles submitted to the NCSA Article Prize competition are ineligible for the Emerging Scholars Award and vice versa; only one entry per scholar or publisher for one of the two awards is allowed annually.
Nineteenth-Century Studies Association’s Officers, Board, Senior Advisory Committee, and Article Prize and Emerging Scholars Award Committee members are not eligible to receive the award until two years have elapsed since their service.
Deadline
The deadline for submission is July 1, 2024.
To Apply
Please use this Google Form to submit your essay. Note that applicants must verify date of actual publication for eligibility.
Inquiries
Kelly Payne, Chair of the Emerging Scholars Committee
payne@hws.edu / EmergingScholarsNCSA@gmail.com
Previous Recipients
2024
C.C. McKee. “Barefeet, or the Ambivalence of Emancipation in Camille Pissarro and the Caribbean,” in Black Modernisms in the Transatlantic World, edited by Steven Nelson and Huey Copeland, 57-77. National Gallery of Art and Yale University Press, 2023.
2024 Honorable Mention:
Wells, Lindsay. “Tobacco for the Flower Garden: Plant Collecting and Plantation Crops in Nineteenth-Century Britain.” Literature Compass Volume 21, Issue 1-3 (digital publication March 16, 2023). https://doi.org/10.1111/lic3.12705
2023
Rebecca Whiteley. “Spratt’s Flaps: Midwifery, Creativity, and Sexuality in Early Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture.” British Art Studies, Issue 19 (February 2021). URL: https://doi.org/10.17658/issn.2058-5462/issue-19/rwhiteley.
2023 Honorable Mention:
Jane Dinwoodie, “Evading Indian Removal in the American South,” Journal of American History, 108.1 (June 2021). https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaab063.
P J Carlino, “Bleacher Bugs and Fifty-Centers: The Social Stratification of Baseball Fans through Stadium Design, 1880–1920,” Buildings & Landscapes, 28.1 (March 2021). https://doi.org/10.5749/buildland.28.1.0005
2022
Nicholas Robbins, “John Constable, Luke Howard, and the Aesthetics of Climate,” The Art Bulletin 103: 2 (June 2021): 50-76.
Honorable mention:
Leila Walker, “Sensitive Plants and Senseless Weeds: Plants, Consciousness, and Elizabeth Kent,” Essays in Romanticism 27.2 (Fall 2020): 115-133.
2021
Justin C. Tackett, “’I heard his silver Call’: Emily Dickinson and the Poetry of Telegraphic Acoustics.” Review of English Studies 71:299 (April 2020): 328–54.
2020
Ann Garascia, “’Impressions of Plants Themselves’: Materializing Eco-Archival Practices with Anna Atkins’s Photographs of British Algae.” Victorian Literature and Culture 47.2 (Summer 2019): 267-303.
2019
Carla Manfredi, “Island Encounters in Focus: Photography and the R. L. Stevenson Family.” Victorian Review 43 (2017): 67-86.
2018
Ashley Reed, “‘I Have No Disbelief’: Spiritualism and Secular Agency in Elizabeth Stoddard’s The Morgesons.” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists (2017): 151-177.
2017
Mira Rai Waits, “The Indexical Trace: A Visual Interpretation of the History of Fingerprinting in Colonia India” Visual Culture in Britain 17 (2016): 18-46.
2016
Lacey Baradel, “Geographic Mobility and Domesticity in Eastman Johnson’s ‘The Tramp.'” American Art 28 (Summer 2014): 27-49.
2015
Henry Cowles, “A Victorian Extinction: Alfred Newton and the Evolution of Animal Protection.” The British Journal for the History of Science 46.4 (2013): 695-714.
2014
Sarah Cornell, “Citizens of Nowhere: Fugitive Slaves and Free African Americans in Mexico, 1833-1857.” The Journal of American History (September 2013): 351-374.
2013
Kimberly Hamlin, “‘The Case of a Bearded Woman’: Hypertrichosis and the Construction of Gender in the Age of Darwin,” American Quarterly, 2011: 955-81.
2012
Ross Barrett, “Rioting Refigured: George Henry Hall and the Picturing of American Political Violence,” The Art Bulletin, September 2010.
2011
Ezra Shales, “Toying With Design Reform: Henry Cole and Instructive Play for Children,” Journal of Design History, 2009.
2010
Marnin Young, “Heroic Indolence Realism and the Politics of Time in Raffaëlli’s Absinthe Drinkers,” The Art Bulletin, June 2009.
2009
Hsuan L. Hsu, “Literature and Regional Production.” American Literary History, 17.1 (2005): 36-69.
2008
Cynthia Imogen Hammond, “Reforming Architecture, Defending Empire: Florence Nightingale and the Pavilion Hospital,” Studies in the Social Sciences. 38 (2005): 1-24.