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 wishes to recognize this year's winner of the Kenshur Prize:
April G. Shelford, A Caribbean Enlightenment: Intellectual Life in the British and French Colonial Worlds, 1750-1792 (Cambridge University Press)
We plan to host a colloquium, featuring comments by April Shelford, as well as by the members of the prize committee (Nush Powell and Brian Cowan) on Friday, October 4.
Previous winners:
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).