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.  

We wish to recognize the following outstanding works of scholarship, which have been shortlisted for this year's prize:

Andrew Benjamin Bricker, Libel and Lampoon: Satire in the Courts, 1670-1792 (Oxford University Press, 2022)

Lenora Hanson, The Romantic Rhetoric of Accumulation (Stanford University Press, 2022)

Kathleen Lubey, What Pornography Knows: Sex and Social Protest since the Eigtheenth Century (Stanford University Press, 2022)

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

Rebekah Mitsein, African Impressions: How African Worldviews Shaped the British Geographical Imagination (Charlottesville: The University of Virginia Press, 2022)

Stephanie O'Rourke, Art, Science, and the Body in Early Romanticism (Cambridge University Press, 2022)

Christina Ramos, Bedlam in the New World: A Mexican Madhouse in the Age of Enlightenment (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2022)

We plan to announce the winner in July 2023.

Previous winners:

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 (Universityof Chicago, 2013).

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