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Founders’ Circle Award
Best Conference Presentation by an Emerging Scholar
The award is judged by members of the VSAWC executive, attending the conference. In 2012, VSAWC established the Founders’ Circle Award for the best paper delivered at the VSAWC conference by a graduate student or emergent scholar (up to 5 years post-graduation) for that year.
Entries are evaluated according to the following criteria: quality and originality; contribution to Victorian studies; quality of writing; quality of presentation. The winner is announced after the annual conference and will receive $400 (CAN).
Past Recipients
Joe Diemer (University of Victoria), “‘Aesthetics for Children’: Art, Religion, and Natural Taste in the Home Treasury Bible Events.” (VSAWC Conference 2024: Victorian Nature & Artifice, Canmore, AB)
Kaitlyn Fralick (Queen’s University), “Motherhood in the Slums: Constructing the Working-Class Mother in Arthur Morrison’s A Child of the Jago.” (VSAWC Conference 2023: Victorian Making/Making Victorians, Winnipeg, MB)
Denae Dyck (University of Victoria), “‘schooled by sin’: Transgression and Transformation in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s A Drama of Exile.” (VSAWC Conference 2019: Victorian Sociability, Calgary, AB)
Dr. Clare Walker Gore (University of Cambridge), “‘They can very well do without much beauty in me’: Disability, Desire, and the Body of the Dickensian Heroine.” (VSAWC/RSVP Conference 2018: The Body and the Page, Victoria, BC)
Jonathan Franklin (New York University), “‘Too Feeble; Too Sickly’: Disability, Social Mobility and the Pupil-Teacher System.” (VSAWC/VISAWUS Conference 2017: Victorian Education, Vancouver BC) – the 2017 Founders’ Circle Award was combined with VISAWUS’s William H. Scheuerle Graduate Student Paper Award
Robert Pasquini (McMaster), “Dead London: Excavating Private Catastrophes in M.P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud.” (VSWAC Conference 2016: Victorian Intimacies, Winnipeg, MB)
Paisley Mann (University of British Columbia), “A Paris of their Own: Women’s Guidebooks and an Embodied Critique of Victorian Travel.” (VSAWC Conference 2015: Victorian Bodies; Kelowna, BC)
Wendy Williams (Texas Christian University), “George Eliot, Female Community, and the Poetess.” (VSAWC Conference 2014: Victorian Communities; Banff, AB)
Alison Hurlburt (University of Alberta), “Arnold Bennett: Clay as Other to Inhabitants of the Five Towns.” (VSAWC Conference 2013: Victorian Humanity and Its Others; Vancouver, BC)
Kylee-Anne Hingston (University of Victoria), “‘As Seeing’s Believing’: Illustration, Focalization and Prosthesis in Dinah Mulock Craik’s The Little Lame Prince.” (VSAWC Conference 2012: Victorian Media; Victoria, BC)