The Literary Encyclopedia Travel Award 2024 - Results Round One

We are pleased to report that we had a very strong crop of contenders in this round of the competition, with stimulating, timely, and well-structured proposals. It was not an easy task choosing the winning applications, but the projects we have decided to reward are original, historically informed and potentially conducive to scholarship of significant impact; we are pleased to be able to extend our support to such valuable and inspiring work.

First place - £750

Oliver Eccles, PhD candidate, University College London – Customs and Duties: Importing the Detective across Networks of World Literature
A facinating comparative study of crime fiction in Japan and Argentina, from the mid-nineteenth- until the early-twentieth-century, it builds on surprising parallels between these two geographically disparate nodes. The project unearths unexplored echoes in the narrative, translation and publishing practices of detective fiction which testify to the power and impact of an emerging, global literary network. In addition to literary works, it examines a broad range of political, legal and sociological texts, thus aiming to demonstrate the complex relationship between modernity, law enforcement and crime narratives.

Second place - £500 each

• Lydia Craig, Instructor of English, Lakeland College, USA - Charles Dickens in Lombard Street: Love, Ambition, and Revenge
  This is a solid historically-based project unearthing the larger set of economic, political and social reasons why Dickens was dismissed as a romantic interest by Maria Beadnell and her family. Besides examining Welsh archival sources pertaining to the Beadnells, including correspondence, land holdings, and investments, the project is also based on textual analysis of novels such as David Copperfield, Bleak House, and Little Dorrit that reveal subtle references to the ethically questionable ambitions of the Beadnells in Montgomeryshire, Powys, Wales. The candidate's scholarship is admired across the Dickens community and she has demostrated a keen interest in the digital humanities in her previous work (e.g. the Dickens Letters Project).
• Olivia Abrams, PhD Candidate, University of Saskatchewan – qe ôwétal slhéq'elexw, tsel we xwlálá: el / “I didn’t understand, I just listened”: Applying Stó:lō Listening Practices to Promote Ethical Settler Literary Engagement
  This is a highly original and engaging work, which aims to provide demonstrations of Indigenous theory in the context of ethical settler engagement with Indigenous texts. It takes up a variety of modes of literatures (poetry, graphic narrative/comics, and orature, and is based on direct engagement with the Stó:lō community in Canada. The impact of this work is based on its choice of "primary texts" (including a placenames tour and community singing), which come out of her previous experience as an ethnohistorical field researcher, rather than simply with published Indigenous poetry and comics.