Prestigious North American Prize for Birkbeck student

James Emmott, a postgraduate research student in the Department of English and Humanities, has been awarded the North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA) award for the Best Graduate Student Paper at the 2011 NAVSA annual conference in Nashville, TN. The judges, who were unanimous in their decision, described James’s essay, ‘“You Can Turn Her On as Often as You Like“: Performing Phonographic Physiology’, as ‘informative, original, and lucid‘.

This latest success comes a year after he was awarded the inaugural Sally Ledger Memorial Travel Bursary prize by the British Association for Victorian Studies (BAVS) and NAVSA, for the best paper presented by a British graduate student at the 2010 NAVSA conference in Montreal.

James, who is also an editorial intern on Birkbeck’s journal 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, said: ‘I was delighted and humbled to receive this prestigious award. Birkbeck has a thriving research culture in nineteenth-century studies and I am especially grateful to the School of Arts for providing the wonderful support that enables postgraduate research students to present work internationally.’

James is completing his PhD on nineteenth-century understandings of composite form in the arts and sciences of the voice and the face, supported by an award from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).