Book Prize

The BAVS-Rosemary Mitchell Prize for a Second Monograph

 

About the BAVS-Rosemary Mitchell Prize

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, the BAVS-Rosemary Mitchell prize 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. 

The Prize is named after the late Professor/Reverend Rosemary Mitchell (1967-2001).  Rosemary was a brilliant scholar who served on the board of BAVS.  Her superb work which covered history, literature and art history, embodied the interdisciplinary project for which BAVS stands.  Naming the Prize after her serves as an inspiration to Victorianists well into the future.

 

2025 winner

 
The 2025 BAVS-Rosemary Mitchell Prize for a second monograph goes to Maria Damkjær for Fiction on the Page in Nineteenth-Century Magazines (Oxford University Press, 2024). 
 
 
The honourable mentions go to:
 
Paul Fyfe – Digital Victorians: From Nineteenth-Century Media to Digital Humanities (Stanford University Press, 2024). 
 
Mary Shannon – Billy Waters is Dancing: Or, How a Black Sailor Found Fame in Regency Britain (Yale University Press, 2024).

 

Previous winners

 

In 2024, the prize was awarded to Alexander Bubb, Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf: Flights of Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023) with an honourable mention given to Fabrice Bensimon, Artisans Abroad: British Migrant Workers in Industrialising Europe, 1815–1870 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023).

In 2023, the prize was awarded to Lara Kriegel, The Crimean War and its Afterlife: Making Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), with an honourable mention given to Rosalind Crone for Illiterate Inmates: Educating Criminals in Nineteenth Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022).

Cover for Crusoes Books The prize was awarded in 2022 to Bill Bell’s Crusoe’s Books: Readers in the Empire of Print, 1800-1918 (Oxford University Press).

Female Husbands

Cover for Picture World 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).

BAVS marked the event with a Zoom session on 28 July 2021 when Jen Manion discussed her book with a group of scholars. Click here to watch the recording.