The Literary Encyclopedia Research Award 2025 - Results Round One

We are pleased to report that we received many interesting and stimulating projects, which indicate the strength, viability and richness of literary research. The assessment of our senior editorial board was based on a combination of factors which included research need vs. environmental awareness; stage of research development (in some cases we have short-listed meritorious projects which can be further developed or refined); access to alternative sources of funding; finally, and above all, the inherent scholarly merit of the proposals submitted for consideration, their timeliness, structural coherence and likely impact. The projects we have decided to reward are original, historically informed and potentially conducive to significant research results; we are pleased to be able to extend our support to such valuable and inspiring work.

First place - £750

Hannah Van Hove, Postdoctoral Researcher, Vrije University Brussels – Identity, Gender and Embodiment in Neo-Avant-Garde Fiction and Art by Women in the United States (1970-1982)
The project proposes a facinating comparative study of neo-avant-garde novels by women in the U.S. during the long 1970s. Focusing on the work of authors such as Kathy Acker, Constance De Jong, Lucy Lippard, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Bernadette Mayer, it reads their novelistic engagements with language, gender and embodiment in conversation with a broader corpus of feminist conceptualist art. Combining literary-historical, art-historical and intersectional feminist insights within an intermedial framework, its overall aim is to understand how and to what effect these writers experimented with language and form in order to explore the gendered body as medium and subject matter, thereby subverting and disrupting traditional representations of gender and identity whilst responding to, engaging with and transmuting contemporary feminist concerns. The findings will contribute to a monograph that revalues women’s contributions to literary and artistic innovation during this transformative period.

Second place - £500 each

• Amanda Vernon, Teaching Fellow, University of Tübingen, Germany - Cure of Souls: The Spiritual Roots of Victorian Therapeutic Reading
  The larger scope of this project is to evaluate the work of Victorian writers as a significant untapped resource for therapeutic reading practice, due to its interest in literature as materially and spiritually curative. It examines how spiritual traditions offered individual and communal practices that benefitted participants psychologically, spiritually, and socially. The more specific focus at this stage is on how Florence Nightingale used the spiritual writings of female Catholic mystics both as a source of therapeutic reading and to inform her own spiritual practice of social reform. The examination of her journals and devotional reading material housed in various archives at the British Library and the Wellcome Collection will result in the publication of original research positioning this crucial medical figure as, additionally, a prolific writer and social activist.
• Lorena Garcia Barroso, Lecturer, University of Columbia - The Author as Censor: Camilo José Cela and the Symbolic Violence of Language
  This is a timely and topical project, especiallly in view of recent questionings of historical memory, the rise of new forms of censorship and the global ascendence of technofascism. It investigates Cela’s contribution to Francoist symbolic violence through his use of language and cultural authority, particularly the author's literary and editorial interventions on behalf of the regime’s efforts to impose Castilian Spanish as the sole linguistic expression of national identity. It will result in a peer-reviewed journal article focused on literary complicity and linguistic ideology under Franco. By foregrounding the intersections of language, power, and cultural violence, this project contributes to broader conversations in literary and political theory, while offering a historically grounded case study of authoritarian aesthetics.

We would also like to mention the following short-listed projects, which we think deserve acknowledgement. We would encourage their authors to re-apply either later this year (in the second round of the competition), or in 2026.

• Elliot Brandsma, PhD Candidate, University of Wisconsin-Madison - The Secularization of Biblical Myth in Swedish, Fenno-Swedish and Finnish Modernist Literature
• Emily Kopley, Lecturer, McGill University - Virginia Woolf's Library, a book project
• Lucille Raynal, Postdoctoral Researcher/Teaching Fellow, University College Dublin - Isabelle de Bourbon-Parme, a military and education advisor