Postgraduate student wins 2011 NAVSA award for Best Graduate Student Paper
James Emmott has won the 2011 NAVSA Best Graduate Student Paper award for his paper on the interrelationship of phonography and physiology.
James Emmott, a postgraduate research student in the Department of English and Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London, has won a North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA) award for his paper examining the relationship between the workings of phonography and physiology in the mid- to late nineteenth century.
The successful paper: ‘You Can Turn Her On as Often as You Like’: Performing Phonographic Physiology, which James presented at the 2011 NAVSA conference in Nashville, TN, last November, was a particular accomplishment since the conference attracted a record number of graduate student applicants and a high number of submissions for the prize itself.
The judges, who were unanimous in their decision, praised James's achievement: ‘James Emmott’s essay builds in an exciting way from Alexander Melville Bell’s phonetic alphabet system to the linguistic re-shaping of Eliza in Shaw’s Pygmalion. Then it expands further, connecting phonographic methods of speech training with theoretical Victorian work on physiological movement, habit and muscular memory formation. We found this essay informative, original, and lucid.'
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). He is co-convener, with Tom F. Wright, of the London Nineteenth-Century Studies Seminar in the Spring term 2012 on the theme of Orality and Literacy, and, with Jonathan Tee, a joint session between the Material Texts Network and the Department of English and Humanities Graduate Lecture Series on Sound and Textuality. He is also an editorial intern on 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century.