The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP) has awarded the 2023 Expanding the Field Prize to Bristol PhD student Tarini Bhambukar, for her groundbreaking essay “Victorian Feminist Periodicals and the ‘New Indian Woman’: Indian Feminism and Indian Women’s Interviews in Women’s Penny Paper and the Woman’s Signal.” 

The committee noted that “This is a polished and lucid essay that quite clearly meets the brief of the Expanding the Field prize.” It offers “a fascinating account of the ways in which the Women’s Penny Paper and Woman’s Signal articulated a transnational vision of feminism by integrating profiles of Indian feminist activists.” Furthermore, the essay “illuminates the dialectic between the White British editor/writer’s positioning of the interview subjects and the subjects’ own self-fashioning in a satisfyingly nuanced way.”

Tarini's winning essay will be published in a forthcoming edition of the Victorian Periodicals Review journal, and you can find out more about her research here.