BADS Essay Prize 2023
The BADS Essay Prize is an annual competition intended to promote an awareness of the broad scope of decadence studies, from antiquity to the present. We welcome 5,000-word essay submissions from postgraduates on any aspect of decadence from any part of the world. Please email your essay and a brief bio to bads@gold.ac.uk by 15 August 2023.
The essays will be judged by the Executive Committee of BADS according to certain criteria. The best essays will:
be an original contribution to and thereby advancement of knowledge in the field;
demonstrate a critical analysis of existing scholarship that is fair, accurate, and relevant;
show awareness of the premises, limitations, and potentialities of the chosen methodology;
have a coherent and balanced structure, and be well-argued;
be written in grammatically sound English;
be referenced accurately and consistently;
be formatted in MHRA style and submitted as a Word document.
The winners will have their essays published in the Autumn 2023 edition of Volupté: Interdisciplinary Journal of Decadence Studies.
BADS Translation Prize 2023
The BADS Translation Prize is an annual competition to find outstanding and exciting new work in the translation of decadent texts into English. This work could be poetry, prose, drama, libretto, or essay and be in any language. The original text should be specific to decadence in the broadest sense and might comprise of an extract or a whole work, up to a maximum of 5,000 words. We particularly welcome translations of lesser-known decadent works, or works that may never have been translated. Please email your translation and a brief bio to bads@gold.ac.uk by 15 August 2023.
Our judges will focus on key criteria and the best translations will:
demonstrate sensitivity to the formal and linguistic demands of the source material;
be written in grammatically sound English or forms appropriate to source material;
be referenced accurately and consistently;
be formatted in MHRA style and submitted as a Word document.
The winners will have their translations published in the Autumn 2023 issue of Volupté: Interdisciplinary Journal of Decadence Studies.
2022 Prizewinners
Essay Prize
Postgraduate: Conner Moore, ‘Hamlet and Decadent Reimagination’
Conner Moore is a PhD student in the English literature program at Miami University, having completed his MA at Miami University in 2021. His planned dissertation explores the representation of nonhuman animals in decadent literature, questioning to what extent the ‘against nature’ creed of decadent writers contradicts the ostensibly sympathetic treatment of animals in many of the texts. He has recently presented papers on the ways in which the commodification of artistic labor is depicted in Vernon Lee’s Miss Brown and Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, as well as on the application of an ecocritical lens to decadent literature, and on Virginia Woolf’s relationship to the decadent movement
Click HERE to read Conner’s essay in Volupté.
Established Scholar: EO Gill, ‘Screwball’
EO Gill is a video artist and curator living and working on Gadigal land (Sydney, Australia). Gill is completing a hybrid PhD in the Department of Gender & Cultural Studies and Sydney College of the Arts at Sydney University. Their creative practice research speaks to bodily sites of tension, suspension and play explored through a self-reflexive documentary style. Gill was the recipient of the Create NSW Visual Arts (Emerging) Fellowship (2018) and has exhibited at Bundoora Homestead (Vic) and Verge Gallery and Artspace (NSW) among others.
Click HERE to read EO’s essay in Volupté.
Translation Prize
Francesca Bugliani Knox, ‘Leopold Andrian, The Garden of Knowledge (1895): A New Translation’
Francesca Bugliani Knox is Honorary Senior Research Associate at University College London. Her publications include translations into Italian as well as several books and articles on various aspects of English and Italian literature from the Renaissance to the present. The full text of her translation of Leopold Andrian’s The Garden of Knowledge is available to purchase from Studio WillDutta.
Click HERE to read Francesca’s translation in Volupté.
2021 Prizewinners
Essay Prize
Postgraduate: Cherrie Kwok, ‘Symbolism, Empire, and the Dance: On Sarojini Naidu’s “Eastern Dancers” and Arthur Symons’s “Javanese Dancers”’
Cherrie Kwok is a PhD Candidate in the Department of English and the Elizabeth Arendall Tilney and Schuyler Merritt Tilney Jefferson Fellow at the University of Virginia. Her dissertation examines a set of writers from the African, Asian, and Indigenous diasporas in the nineteenth century and beyond to elucidate the relationship between decadence and anti-imperialism in their poetry and prose. Her work appears, or is forthcoming, in Volupté: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Decadence Studies, Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, and The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy.
Click HERE to read Cherrie’s essay in Volupté.
Established Scholar: David Melville, ‘“We Must Find Out If We Are Still Alive!”: Sex Apocalypse and How to Survive it in La Messe dorée’
David Melville is a teaching fellow in Film Studies and Literature at the University of Edinburgh Centre for Open Learning. His courses include Gothic Cinema, Vampire Fiction, Dark Fairy Tales, Divine Decadence and Magnificent Obsessions: A Century of Film Melodrama. A former journalist and radio news presenter, he has contributed widely to The Guardian, Sight & Sound, Senses of Cinema, Gay Times, Shadowplay, and the Romanian film journal Noul Cinema. His current project is a book on Cinema and Queer Spectatorship, which he can only describe as a blend of autobiography, film criticism, and non-fiction novel.
Click HERE to read David’s essay in Volupté.
Translation Prize
Céline Brossillon, ‘Isabelle Eberhardt, “Infernalia: Sepulchral Pleasure” (1895): A New Translation’
Céline Brossillon is Assistant Professor of French at Ursinus College, Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on the crisis of masculine identity at the end of the nineteenth century in France, and the connection between solitude and madness in literature. She is particularly interested in deviant behaviours that result from overextended isolation. Her research engages with multiple fields such as cultural anthropology, gender and sexuality studies, and psychiatry. She is the author of Le Taureau triste: La Solitude du célibataire de Maupassant (The Sad Bull: The Solitude of Maupassant’s Bachelor, CNRS Editions, 2021). She is also the co-editor of a special issue of French Forum titled L’Amour des Morts: Love with Ghosts, Vampires and Other Dead(ly) Beings in the Francophone 19th Century, which will be published in Spring 2022.
Click HERE to read Céline’s translation in Volupté.
2020 Prizewinners
Joanna Cresswell, ‘The Ecology of Suffering: Thinking with the Elements in Decadent Literature’
Joanna Cresswell recently completed an MA in Comparative Literature and Criticism at Goldsmiths, University of London. In 2019 she won first place in the British Comparative Literature Association’s Arthur Terry Postgraduate Essay Prize for her essay, ‘Wit as a Weapon: Male Anxiety and Female Laughter in Feminist Responses to Epic and Ancient Myth’. This research went on to form the basis of her dissertation, ‘Masochism, Metamorphosis, Madness’, an examination of psycho-medical mirth and the figure of the laughing woman in late-nineteenth century French literature.
Click HERE to read Joanna’s essay in Volupté.
William Rees, ‘“Le Freak, c’est Chic”: Decadence and Disco’
William Rees is a freelance history writer who is interested in the histories of popular music, particularly disco and rock, and how these tie into philosophical themes of individualism and societal change. He recently completed a Masters by Research History course at the University of Exeter and is aspiring towards doctoral research. William also writes his own blog, Will Does History.
Click HERE to read William’s essay in Volupté.
2019 Prizewinners
Postgraduate: Amelia Hall, ‘Elliptical Thinking: Planetary Patterns of Thought in De Profundis’
Amelia Hall is a PhD candidate at Cornell University, specializing in British literature of the long nineteenth century. Her dissertation, ‘Epigraphic Encounters and the Origins of the English Novel,’ examines the role that chapter epigraphs played in the evolution of the British novel’s form and develops a new theory for reading this structurally significant paratext. An article based on this research is forthcoming in SEL Studies in English Literature. Her second research project explores the relationship between scientific forms and innovative literary forms of the fin de siècle.
Click HERE to read Amelia’s essay in Volupté.
Established Scholar: Graham John Wheeler, ‘Apuleius and the Esoteric Revival: An Ancient Decadent in Modern Times’
Graham John Wheeler is an independent scholar based in London. His background is in Classics, and he pursued undergraduate and postgraduate studies in that subject at Cambridge University. He has since been engaged in publishing a series of articles on the revival of ancient forms of religion in modern times, and he is seeking to pursue a further postgraduate qualification in this area.
Click HERE to read Graham’s essay in Volupté.