Stansky Prize Shortlist 2026

The committee has selected the following four books for the 2026 Stansky Book Prize shortlist for the best book in British Studies dealing with the period since 1800.

• Sarah Bilston, The Lost Orchid: A Story of Victorian Plunder and Obsession (Harvard University Press)

• Nana Osei Quarshie, African Pharmakon: The Asylum as Shrine from Slavery to the Return (University of Chicago Press)

• Julia Stephens, Worldly Afterlives: Tracing Family Trails Between India and Empire (Princeton University Press)

Brief descriptions of the books and links to the publishers’ websites appear below.

The winner of the Stansky Prize will be announced at the NACBS awards ceremony, which will take place this year virtually on November 4 at 12:00pm ET. We hope you will join us to celebrate. You can rsvp to attend the award ceremony here.

Sarah Bilston, The Lost Orchid: A Story of Victorian Plunder and Obsession (Harvard University Press)

At first glance, The Lost Orchid is a tale of a treasure hunt, where the treasure that eludes so many for so long is but a single delicate root. In a rich and expansive telling, Sarah Bilston reconstructs the ambitions and emotions of the Victorians who people this story, from amateur botanists, brash entrepreneurs, desperate plant hunters, and eager middle-class consumers, as they join in on orchid mania during the second half of the nineteenth century. The book situates this history within the initiatives feeding the frenzy, most notably Britons’ exaltation of imperial enterprise and the effort to bring scientific order to the natural world. Part history and part literary analysis, The Lost Orchid brings together an impressive array of sources, with the most important being the collections of personal letters that Bilston reads as literary texts themselves. Under Bilston’s innovative approach and interpretive eye, the search for the elusive lost orchid morphs into a darker, more significant tale of the social and environmental costs of an extractive economy.

Nana Osei Quarshie, African Pharmakon: The Asylum as Shrine from Slavery to the Return (University of Chicago Press)

Nana Osei Quarshie’s African Pharmakon is an innovative, provocative, generative, and insightful contribution to the histories of medicine and British and European colonialism. Drawing on striking archival research, Quarshie traces the development and significance of a ‘West African pharmakon’ of techniques for understanding and treating mental illness, grafted together in the encounter between European psychiatry and West African systems of mental health and healing in precolonial and colonial Ghana. Much more than an ‘asylum study,’ African Pharmakon is theoretically rich and interdisciplinary. It is also clear, focused, direct, and persuasive. The book is an impressive work of both colonial and postcolonial theory and archival research and will be widely read and discussed across many fields.

Julia Stephens, Worldly Afterlives: Tracing Family Trails Between India and Empire (Princeton University Press)

Worldly Afterlives is a deeply original collage of mobile lives, diasporas, and empires and a profound reflection on the practices and materiality of history. Julia Stephens reorients diasporic histories beyond national or ethnic frames by finding women in patriarchal genealogies and historical traces haunting everyday objects across the Indian Ocean and the British Empire. The fluid identities in these diasporas are told in a series of microhistories sparked by physical touch or emotional connection with photographs for identity documents, family heirlooms, museum artifacts, or threads that bind archival records. The family researchers Stephens encounters in archives and online forums become collaborators in the creation of her collage, as well as their own assemblages of family memories. This methodologically innovative, theoretically sophisticated, and ethically self-aware study explores the limitations of conventional genealogies and the possibilities of new, diasporic archives on social media. Stephens’ conversations with her students as well as the descendants of the people profiled in the book unsettle conventional expectations of how history should be written and will prompt ongoing dialogue about the writing of history in the future.

Congratulations to these authors for their outstanding scholarship.