Wheaton professor receives international honor for her work
Winter Jade Werner, associate professor of English, has received an honorable mention from the Richard Stein Essay Prize for her article, “The Hikayat Abdullah, the Missionary Press, and the Making of Nineteenth-Century ‘World Literature,'” published in the journal Comparative Literature.
The Richard Stein Essay Prize is awarded by INCS (Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies) and recognizes excellence in interdisciplinary scholarship on any nineteenth-century topic.
The prize committee—Lara Kriegel (Indiana University, Bloomington), Holly Case (Brown University), and Andrea Rager (Case Western Reserve University)—praised Werner’s work for illuminating larger historical forces while exploring a singular story.
“Deeply researched, theoretically informed, and analytically sharp, this essay uses the historians’ tool of microhistory to understand an intriguing nineteenth-century literary encounter involving Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir, known as the father of Malay literature,” the committee wrote in awarding the honor.
“Casting her eye beyond this microhistory, Werner entertains larger questions about the category of the literary and the notion of the nation. Even in a secularizing epoch, she locates religious institutions and religious practices at the heart of the making of world literature as a field.”
Professor Werner, who is spending the 2025-2026 academic year as a visiting scholar at the Universiti Malaya in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, examines the intersection of Victorian studies, postcolonial studies, and periodical studies, with a focus on British Protestant missionary print culture in Southeast Asia. Her book in progress, Ink and Empire: Missionary Presses and the Making of Victorian World Literature, examines how international missionary presses, operating under British imperial influence in Southeast Asia, helped shape and consolidate nineteenth-century ideas of the emerging category of ‘world literature.’