The BAVS-Rosemary Mitchell Prize for a Second Monograph 2027
Annually, BAVS awards the Rosemary Mitchell Book Prize to the best second monograph published that year in Victorian studies. The prize is judged by a panel of BAVS scholars.
Unlike other book prizes, this is specifically intended to honour the work of mid-career Victorianists in all disciplines who publish a monograph over the past year. The Prize will draw the attention of the Victorian Studies community to important new work in the field. The Prize also represents a celebration of the monograph as a form. Full rules are below.
2026 winner
The 2026 Rosemary Mitchell Book Prize for a Second Monograph in Victorian Studies has been awarded to Stephanie O’Rourke for Picturing Landscape in an Age of Extraction (Chicago UP, 2025)
Honourable Mentions:
Nathan Hensley, Action Without Hope: Victorian Literature after Climate Collapse (Chicago UP, 2025)
Keren Hammerschlag, The Chosen Race: Troubling Whiteness in Victorian Painting (University of California Press, 2026)
Competition rules
Judges: Professor Martin Hewitt (Chair), Dr Claudia Capancioni, Dr Amy Waterson.
Nomination Deadline: 1st February 2027
Deadline for receipt of books: 15th February 2027 (1st March 2027 for publications outside the UK)
This is a prize awarded by the British Association for Victorian Studies (BAVS) which is intended for mid-career scholars. The winning book will be the second book by a scholar (excluding essay collections, edited texts, fiction, etc).
Eligible contenders must have published a scholarly work in Victorian Studies during 2026.1 In order to submit, an author has to be a paid up member of BAVS on 1st February 2027. Members of BAVS outside the UK can enter books for the prize. Applicants for the prize do not need to have a university post.
The work needs to be a scholarly monograph in Victorian Studies (multi-authored collections of articles are excluded, but joint-authored monographs are eligible and the prize can be shared). We will not accept scholarly editions of Victorian texts, neo-Victorian novels or websites.
We will accept monograph studies devoted to the long nineteenth century (broadly defined) but will also accept works that deal with neo-Victorian Studies as well. The work in question does need to have some post-1830 content (up to 1914). The prize is open to scholars in any discipline that deals with nineteenth-century Britain, the British empire, or Britain’s relationship with the wider world.
Books may be nominated by authors or publishers. We accept that the author’s first book may not have been in Victorian Studies: they simply have to have published an earlier monograph. If publishers or authors wish to check if a work is eligible or not, they should email the Chair of the panel, at mitchellchair@bavs.ac.uk before 15th January 2027.
Nominations can be made at any time before 1st February 2027, by email to the Chair of the panel, at the above address. The nomination must indicate the name and publication details of the author’s first monograph, as well as full publication details, including precise date of publication, of the nominated work. (For the purposes of eligibility the date of publication should be the date of first publication in book form, rather than any earlier date of digital availability.) The panel will need to be provided with THREE hard copies of the nominated work (paperback copies are acceptable). Upon nomination, authors/publishers will be provided with the addresses to which the books should be sent.
The final deadline for receipt of books is 15 February 2027 (for UK publications), and 1 March (for publications from outside the UK) (nominators must ensure that there is sufficient time between nomination and this deadline for books to be despatched and reach the panellists. Volumes received after the cut-off dates will not be eligible and will not be returned. It is the responsibility of authors to make sure that publishers meet these deadlines. We do not expect authors to pay for copies and take no responsibility for this. Books sent for consideration will not be returned. Dispatch of the books by authors or publishers grants BAVS ownership of them.
The cash prize is £500. If a monograph is joint-authored, the prize money will be divided between the authors. The prize winner(s) will be announced in early April and will be invited to attend the following BAVS conference later in the summer (standard conference fee, travel expenses within the UK and a contribution to accommodation of up to £200 will be paid by BAVS). A conference panel will be devoted to the prize-winning book.
The Judges’ decision is final, and no correspondence will be entered into in respect of the panel’s decision. All judges are required to declare any conflict of interest.
Previous winners
The BAVS-Rosemary Mitchell Prize 2025 was awarded to Maria Damkjær for Fiction on the Page in Nineteenth-Century Magazines (Oxford University Press, 2024). Honourable mentions went to Paul Fyfe for Digital Victorians: From Nineteenth-Century Media to Digital Humanities (Stanford University Press, 2024), and Mary Shannon for Billy Waters is Dancing: Or, How a Black Sailor Found Fame in Regency Britain (Yale University Press, 2024).
The 2024 prize went to Alexander Bubb’s Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf: Flights of Translation (Oxford University Press, 2023), with an honourable mention for Fabrice Bensimon’s Artisans Abroad: British Migrant Workers in Industrialising Europe, 1815–1870 (Oxford University Press, 2023).
The prize was awarded in 2022 to Bill Bell’s Crusoe’s Books: Readers in the Empire of Print, 1800-1918 (Oxford University Press).
In 2023, the prize was awarded to Lara Kriegel’s The Crimean War and its Afterlife: Making Modern Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2022), with an honourable mention given to Rosalind Crone for Illiterate Inmates: Educating Criminals in Nineteenth Century England (Oxford University Press, 2022).
The prize was awarded in 2022 to Bill Bell’s Crusoe’s Books: Readers in the Empire of Print, 1800-1918 (Oxford University Press).
This prize was awarded for the first time in 2021 to Jen Manion’s Female Husbands: A Trans History (Cambridge University Press) with an honourable mention for Rachel Teukolsky’s Picture World: Image, Aesthetics and Victorian New Media (Oxford University Press).