Since 2007, the Center has awarded an annual book prize to an outstanding monograph of interest to scholars of the eighteenth century working in a range of disciplines. The prize is named in honor of the work of Oscar Kenshur, professor emeritus of comparative literature at Indiana University, a dix-huitièmiste par excellence, former Chicago cab driver, and one of the founding members of the Center.   

The Center welcomes submissions for the 2024 Kenshur Prize, from now until the deadline of January 31, 2025.  Nominated books must hold a 2024 copyright.  To nominate a book for the prize, please send three hard copies of the book to the prize committee, as instructed below.

Please send two copies to the following address:

Barbara Truesdell (c/o Kenshur Prize competition)

Franklin Hall 0030B

Indiana University

601 E. Kirkwood Avenue

Bloomington, IN 47405

And please send one copy to the following address:

April Shelford (c/o Kenshur Prize competition)

1218 Perry St. NE, Apt. 203

Washington, DC 20017

Previous winners:

April G. Shelford, A Caribbean Enlightenment: Intellectual Life in the British and French Colonial Worlds, 1750-1792 (Cambridge University Press, 2023)

Meredith Martin and Gillian Weiss, The Sun King at Sea: Maritime Art and Galley Slavery in Louis XIV's France (Getty Publications, 2022).

Henrietta Harrison, The Perils of Interpreting: The Extraordinary Lives of Two Translators between Qing China and the British Empire (Princeton University Press, 2021).

Vincent Brown, Tacky's Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War (Harvard University Press, 2020).

Lynn Festa, Fiction Without Humanity: Person, Animal, Thing in Early Enlightenment Literature and Culture (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).

William Deringer, Calculated Values: Finance, Politics, and the Quantitative Age (Harvard University Press, 2018).

Amanda Jo Goldstein, Sweet Science: Romantic Materialism and the New Logics of Life (University of Chicago Press, 2017).

Deirdre Loughridge, Haydn's Sunrise, Beethoven's Shadow: Audiovisual Culture and the Emergence of Musical Romanticism (University of Chicago Press, 2016).

Sean Silver, The Mind is a Collection: Case Studies in Eighteenth-Century Thought (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).

Michael Kwass, Contraband: Louis Mandrin and the Making of a Global Underground (Harvard University Press, 2014).

Hanneke Grootenboer, Treasuring the Gaze: Intimate Vision in Late Eighteenth-Century Eye Miniatures (University of Chicago Press, 2013).

Srinivas Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel (University of Chicago Press, 2012).

James H. Johnson, Venice Incognito: Masks in the Serene Republic (University of California Press, 2011).

Joanna Stalnaker, The Unfinished Enlightenment: Description in the Age of the Encyclopedia (Cornell University Press, 2010).

Dan Edelstein, The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 2009).

Vanessa Agnew, Enlightenment Orpheus: the Power of Music in Other Worlds (Oxford University Press, 2008).

Trish Loughran, The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770-1870 (Columbia University Press, 2007).