Each year, NASSR offers several travel bursaries of CDN$250 each to assist graduate students presenting papers in person at the annual NASSR conference. The competition is open to all NASSR members who are graduate students, with the exception of students who received bursaries in the previous year. At least one bursary will go to a student at a Canadian university and at least one will go to a student at a U.S. university. Applications are assessed in terms both of merit and need.
For Romantic Insurrections / Counter-Insurrections, applicants should submit a copy of their accepted conference proposal, proof of graduate student status (e.g. unofficial transcript), and a budget (including both estimated costs and other sources of funding) by Monday, 22 July, 2024. Please email applications to [email protected]. Please note that all of those applying for bursaries must be NASSR members in good standing. Bursary cheques will be handed out at the conference or, if necessary, mailed out after the conference. NB: Travel bursaries will be disbursed only to students who physically travel to the conference and therefore have those additional costs; students who attend virtually, should that be an option, are not eligible.
To encourage diversity in our membership and at our conferences, NASSR has earmarked some travel funds for graduate students of colour, students with disabilities, LGBTQ and/or first-generation students. If you would like to be considered for one of these bursaries, in your application please outline your eligibility in one or two sentences.
Funding for these bursaries is made possible by the generous contributions from the organizers of the Dalhousie (1999), Winnipeg (2015), Ottawa (2017), and SHSU (2023) NASSR conferences.
Graduate Student Paper Prizes
Each year NASSR conference organizers offer prizes for graduate student papers presented at their conference; those interested should consult the conference-specific websites for upcoming events.
2023 Winners:
2022 Winners: (dual winners of Best Graduate Student Paper)
Diana Little (Princeton), "Wordsworth’s Webs: Spinning the Ecological Elegy"
Dana Moss (Michigan), “Waste in the Nineteenth-Century Lyric”
2019 Winners:
Best Graduate Student Paper: Andrew Sargent (Western) “Citing Disaster: Citation and the (Non)Future in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man”
Outstanding Graduate Student Paper: Trevor McMichael (Indiana University, Bloomington), “Wordsworth’s Revenge”
Outstanding Graduate Student Paper: Alice Rhodes (University of York), “‘Transcripts of the heart’: John Thelwall and Romantic Era Shorthand Writing”
2018 Winner:
Best Graduate Student Paper: Valentina Varinelli (Newcastle University), “‘[T]he accents of an unknown land’: Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Writings In Italian”
2017 Winners:
Best Graduate Student Paper: Atesede Makonnen (Johns Hopkins), “Our ‘Blackamoor or Negro Othello’: Rejecting the Affective Power of Blackness”
Outstanding Graduate Student Paper: Jonathan Kerr (Toronto), “Things ‘Never Heard of Before’: Hogg, the Unnatural, and Romantic Cultural Science”
2016 Winners:
Best Graduate Student Paper: Kirsten Page (Berkeley), "Wagnerian Climate Fantasies: Sound, Space, Breath"
Outstanding Graduate Student Paper: Jacob Leveton (Northwestern), "Painting Politics, Seeing Scientific Dissent: Spinoza, Wright's Experiment, Priestley's Chemistry."
2015 Winners:
Best Graduate Student Paper: Lise Gaston (Berkeley), "Gossip Economies: Jane Austen, Lady Susan, and the Right to Self-Fashion"
Outstanding Graduate Student Paper: Jennifer Hargrave (Rice), "Romantic Poetry within the Chinese Landscape"
2014 Winners:
Best Graduate Student Paper: Arden Hegele (Columbia), "Romantic Autopsy and Wordsworth's Two-Part Prelude"
Outstanding Graduate Student Paper: Deanna Koretsky (Duke), "Unhallowed Arts: Frankenstein and the Poetics of Suicide"
2013 Winners:
Best Graduate Student Paper: Jacob Risinger (Harvard), "Transatlantic Fate: Emerson, Cavell, and Beautiful Necessity"
Outstanding Graduate Student Paper: Carmen Mathes (University of British Columbia), "'Let us not therefore go hurrying about': Towards an Aesthetics of Passivity in Keats"
2012 Winners:
Best Graduate Student Paper: Markus Iseli (Neuchâtel), "Thomas de Quincey and the Cognitive Prospects of the Unconscious"
Outstanding Graduate Student Paper: Jillian Hess (Stanford), "Re-framing Poetry: the Romantic Essay and the Prospects of Verse"
2011 Winners:
Best Graduate Student Paper: Brittany Pladek (U of Toronto), "'Soothing Thoughts': Romantic Palliative Care and the Poetics of Relief"
Outstanding Graduate Student Paper: Michael Verderame (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), "'A Rapid Masque of Death': Percy Shelley and Tambora’s Revolutionary Legacy"
2010 Winners:
Best Graduate Student Paper: Anahid Nersessian (Chicago), "Empire and Attachment: A Transnational Tale"
Outstanding Graduate Student Paper: Rachel Lee (Rochester), "From 'inane phraseology' to 'plain language': Reading Media History in Wordsworth's Preface"
2009 Winners:
Best Graduate Student Paper: Chris Bundock (Western Ontario), "'A feeling that I was not for that hour / Nor for that place': Wordsworth's Modernity"
Outstanding Graduate Student Paper: Amanda Jo Goldstein (Berkeley), "Growing Old Together: Composite Physiognomy, Prosopopoeia and 'The Triumph of Life'"
2008 Winners:
Best Graduate Student Paper: Lily Gurton-Wachter (Berkeley), "'An Enemy that Nature has made': Charlotte Smith and the Natural Enemy"
Outstanding Graduate Student Paper: Annika Mann (Indiana), "That 'strange and awful hour / of vast concussion': Reading Time in Beachy Head”
2007 Winners:
Best Graduate Student Paper: Julie M. Barst (Purdue), "Transporting the Picturesque: National and Imperial Subjectivity Through the Claude Lorraine Glass"
Outstanding Graduate Student Paper: Joseph Rezek (UCLA), "The Irish National Tale and the Re-Invention of the English Reader"
2006 Winners:
Best Graduate Student Paper: Dimitri Karkoulis (Western Ontario), "‘They pluck'd the tree of science and sin': Byron's Cain and the Science of Sacrilege"
Outstanding Graduate Student Paper: Joshua Lambier (Western Ontario), "Organismic Revolutionaries: Shelley, Schelling, and the History of Nature"
2005 Winners:
Best Graduate Student Paper: Terry F. Robinson (Colorado, Boulder), “‘A Mere Skeleton of History’: Reading Relics in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey”
Outstanding Graduate Student Papers (tie): Eric Lindstrom (Yale), “Coleridge’s Imagination, Wordsworth’s Bodily Course” and Emily Rohrbach (Boston), “Anna Barbauld’s History of the Future”
2004 Winners:
Best Graduate Student Papers (tie): Courtney Wennerstrom (Indiana, Bloomington), "Cosmopolitan Bodies and Dissected Sexualities: Anatomical Mis-stories in Ann Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho" and Bo Earle (Chicago), "‘World Legislation’: The Form and Function of a Properly Romantic Cosmopolis"
Outstanding Graduate Paper: Leslie Eckel (Yale), "Wordsworth’s American Incarnations"
2003 Winners:
Best Graduate Paper: Suzie Park (California, Berkeley), "This Disclosure Which is Not One: Recognizing Depth, Resisting Commissioned Interiors in The Wanderers"
Outstanding Graduate Student Paper: Dana Van Kooy (Colorado, Boulder), "Re-Imagining Communities through Collective Praxis: How Keats Illicits from, Reflects, and Re-Produces Interpretive Communities"
2002 Winners:
Best Graduate Student Paper Presented at NASSR 2002: Mark Hewitt (NYU), "[Re]zoning the Naive: Schiller's Construction of Auto-historiography"
Outstanding Graduate Student Papers Presented at NASSR 2002 (tie): Julie Murray (York), "Baillie, Wordsworth, and the Case of Economic Man" and Peter Melville (McMaster), "Staging the Nation: Hospitable Performances in Kant’s Anthropology"