Congratulations to HADVC MA student Ashna Rana
Department of Art + Design - 7 May 2026
HADVC MA student Ashna Rana was awarded the Founders' Circle Award for her paper The Child at the Crystal Palace: Medieval Memory and Modern Progress at the 1851 Great Exhibition, presented at the Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada (VSAWC) Conference in Winnipeg, May 1-2, 2026. The Founders' Circle Award is for the best paper delivered at the VSAWC conference by a graduate student or emergent scholar for that year. Ashna presented material from her MA thesis, which she successfully defended in April.
Ashna's paper examines the figure of the child at the Great Exhibition of 1851, arguing that Victorian visual culture mobilized childhood as a contested site where two ideologies, medievalism and modern progress, were publicly negotiated and displayed.
Congratulations, Ashna!
Image: "Mediaeval Court from the Great Exhibition" by Joseph Nash (1808-78)
Image: "The Machinery Court at the Great Exhibition" by Joseph Nash (1808-78)