2026 POSTGRADUATE PRIZE
The Society of Dix-Neuviémistes (SDN) Postgraduate Prize is awarded for the best postgraduate conference paper submitted for the Society’s Annual Conference. Postgraduates whose papers are accepted for the conference are strongly encouraged to submit their paper for consideration for the Prize.
Postgraduates participating in the conference are strongly encouraged to submit a written version of their paper for consideration for the Society’s Postgraduate Prize. Postgraduate includes any student, master’s or doctoral, in the course of their studies, and those in the period between their viva and the final submission of their thesis, i.e., students are eligible up to graduation from the doctoral programme.
The due date is 5pm on Monday 13 April and papers should be between 2,000 and 3,000 words in length (including references). Please also include a bibliography; this is not included in the word count.
All entrants will have the opportunity to receive feedback on their work from the assessment panel.
Please send your entries as an e-mail attachment (.doc, .docx or .pdf format) to Heather Williams (h.williams@cymru.ac.uk).
If you have any questions about the Postgraduate Prize, please contact our Postgraduate and ECR Representative, Helen McKelvey (drhelenmckelvey@gmail.com).
CURRENT PRIZE-HOLDER
2025
Winner: Abigail Fields (Yale University)
‘Vous, les agriculteurs, hommes de progrès et de moralité!’; or, Flaubert and the Politics of the Comices Agricoles
PAST WINNERS
2024
Winner: Ellamae Lepper (University of Cambridge)
Veiling and Unveiling Violence: What the Salon Obscures in Balzac’s Autre étude de femme
2023
Joint winner: Chun-Han (Michelle) Hsu (University of Oxford)
Between the picturesque and the political: Pierre Loti’s play La Fille du Ciel
Joint winner: Roger Navas i Solé (University of Oxford)
Hugo, Sainte-Beuve and the Writer Prophet
2022
Winner: Sophie Maddison (University of Glasgow)
Reading Beyond Gender in Zola’s Commercial Crowds: From Au Bonheur des Dames (1883) to L’Argent (1891)
2021
Winner: Eleanor Stefiuk (University of Cambridge)
Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s Anarchism: A Legacy of the Paris Commune
2020
The SDN Postgraduate Prize was not awarded in 2020 owing to the cancellation of the annual conference due to COVID-19.
2019
Winner: Beatrice Fagan (University of Kent)
Reading the female body: Medical exploration of criminal abortion
2018
Winner: Rebecca Sugden (University of Cambridge)
‘Cette mystérieuse Révolution’: George Sand’s Secret History of 1789
2017
Winner: Helen Craske (University of Oxford)
The Decadent Ideal of Impenetrability
2016
Winner: Allison Deutsch (University College London)
The Flesh of Painting: Caillebotte’s Butcher Shop Windows
Highly commended: Stacie Allan (University of Bristol)
Female Bodies of National Significance: Marie-Guillemine Benoist, Germaine de Staël, and Claire de Duras
2015
Winner: Jordi Brahamcha-Marin (Université du Maine)
Victor Hugo dans la Grande Guerre
2014
Winner: Polly Dickson (University of Cambridge)
Feeling Figures: Affect and Mimesis in Balzac’s La Peau de Chagrin
Highly commended: Matthew Sandefer (Princeton University)
Perverting Nostalgia: The Scandal of Barbey d’Aurevilly’s ‘Deux anecdotes d’après souper’
2013
Winner: Edmund Birch (University of Cambridge)
‘J’ai une vie d’enfer’ – Journalism in the Goncourts’ Charles Demailly
Highly Commended: Valentina Gosetti (University of Oxford)
Between representation and imagination: a voyage pittoresque et diabolique in Dijon in Gaspard de la Nuit
Highly Commended: Sven Greitschus (Bangor University)
Baudelaire’s Fatalism
2012
Hannah Scott (University of Bristol)
Composition for a Choir of Noise: feminine aurality in Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames
2011
Kelly Presutti (SUNY at Stony Brook)
The Vulgar Painter and his Dirty Colours: Gustave Courbet and his Modernisation of Paris
2010
Sam Bootle (Birkbeck College, London)
Jules Laforgue and the illusion of spontaneity
2009
Co-Winner: Claire White (Cambridge University)
The eternal return of work: Émile Zola and the limits of leisure
Co-Winner: Greg Kerr (Trinity College, Dublin)
Rimbaud’s ‘Villes’ and the ‘multiplicateur de progrès’
2008
Anne O’Neill-Henry (Duke University)
Nouveaux tableaux de Paris, nouvelles mémoires de la ville: documenting and re-writing the 19th century city
2007
Andrew Counter (Cambridge University)
“Sain d’esprit”: the notary as analyst in the fiction of Guy de Maupassant
(published in Dix-Neuf, October 2007).
2005-2006
Deirdre McAnally (Pennsylvania State University)
Taking a bite out of crime: Narration and Criminality in Hugo and Zola
2004
Rachel Chrastil (Yale University)
Military preparation in peacetime: training societies, 1871-92
(published in Dix-Neuf, April 2005).