Previous winners of the Colby Prize are:
- 2009: Catherine Waters, Commodity Culture in Dickens’s Household Words: The Social Life of Goods (Ashgate)
- 2008: Kathryn Ledbetter, Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals: Commodities in Context (Ashgate)
- 2007: David Finkelstein, Ed., Print Culture and the Blackwood Tradition (University of Toronto Press)
- 2005-2006: Linda Hughes, Graham R.: Rosamund Marriott Watson, Woman of Letters (Ohio University Press) and Peter Morton, The Busiest Man in London: Grant Allen and the Writing Trade, 1875-1900 (Palgrave)