ASECS Gottschalk Prize: Chair, Amelia Rauser, with Logan Connors and Rachel Carnell.
This year the prize is split between two very different, yet equally impressive and important books: Mei Mei Rado, The Empire’s New Cloth: Cross-Cultural Textiles at the Qing Court (Yale, 2025) and Dan Edelstein, The Revolution to Come: A History of an Idea from Thucydides to Lenin (Princeton, 2025). Together, these two books represent the best of our field.
Mei-Mei Rado’s The Empire’s New Cloth dazzles with its deep research into textiles and their cross-cultural uses in both Asia and Europe, demonstrating mastery of different languages, cultures, and archives in both China and France, as well as the technical aspects of silk manufacture and tapestry weaving. She rewrites the received understanding of Orientalism, arguing instead that chinoiserie is a shared, fluid, global style “floating back and forth between China and Europe, evoking in each place something foreign and exotic while also adapting to local cultural desires and expectations.” Rado synthesizes impressive archival research with close readings of visual and literary sources, situating material practices within broader debates about race, labor, and sovereignty. The book’s argument reframes familiar narratives of empire by foregrounding material practices that linked plantation economies, powerful empires, artisanal production, and elite display. The result is a study that speaks across disciplines while remaining focused on such a diverse and unique corpus.
Dan Edelstein’s The Revolution to Come is a tour de force across time and space. Its central insight is that revolutions are conceptual, not sociological, events—thus, it is also a potent defense of the history of ideas. By mapping the circulation of ideas about sovereignty, rights, and regeneration, he shows how Enlightenment thinkers created a horizon of anticipation that reoriented political time. The book situates canonical figures alongside lesser-known writers to reveal the broader discursive field in which revolutionary futures were articulated. The book is a timely reminder of the limits of political moderation as well as a caution against jumping at every revolutionary call. It is breathtaking in its temporal and geographic scope while all the while grounding the fundamental traits of modern revolution in the eighteenth century. Most important are his powerful concluding observations about how a regime shifts seamlessly from democracy to dictatorship. He ends the book with a prescient warning: “Our biggest fear should be that no one even notices the revolution to come.”
Together, these two books stand up for the importance of ideas and proclaim the eighteenth century’s enduring centrality in our understanding of modernity, even as they remind us of the globally interconnected nature of our period. They also represent research excellence of two very different types: archival understanding and close study of material objects on the one hand; and synthetic mastery of a vast corpus of texts and ideas on the other. Between them, they truly represent the best of our field.
James Clifford Prize: Chair, Masano Yamashito, with Douglas Fordham, Terry Robinson
Oliver Wunsch, The Aesthetic Redemption of the Black Body in Eighteenth-Century France Art History 48:1
In his essay, Oliver Wunsch adeptly demonstrates “how the differing goals of artists and philosophers yielded divergent forms of engagement with Blackness”. Wunsch argues that the aesthetic aims of painters, focused on producing ‘visual pleasure’, introduce a disjuncture between a social discourse that would at times marginalize or demean Black subjects and the formal qualities involved in capturing Blackness. Wunsch calls this phenomenon the ‘aesthetic redemption’ of the Black body. Wunsch wonderfully captures of the uniqueness of painting as a discursive field.
“Wunsch’s article, which complicates ‘the dichotomy of artistic humanisation and stereotypical objectification’ in curatorial assessments of eighteenth-century portraits of Black subjects, is valuable (essential?) reading for anyone interested in visual art, aesthetic theory, natural philosophy, historiography, and exhibition curation.”
Honorable Mention: Jacob Myers, “Keeping the Rat-Book: Marly and Visceral Histories of Jamaican Agriculture.”(Early American Literature, Volume 60, Number 1, 2025, pp. 21-41)
Annibel Jenkins Prize: Chair David Alff, with Rebecca Haidt and Robert Paulett
Janis Tomlinson, Goya: A Portrait of the Artist, Princeton UP, 2020
This rigorous account of a landmark visual artist impressed the committee with its ability to immerse readers in the politics, patronage, and courtly intrigue of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Spain. We especially appreciated Tomlinson’s skill in recovering Goya as a professional painter rather than as a Byronic hero or clandestine revolutionary, as he is sometimes sketched. The resulting portrait raises complex questions of career ambition, artistic expression, and moral complicity that remain evergreen today.
Honorable Mention: S. Scott Rohrer, The Folly of Revolution: Thomas Bradbury Chandler and the Loyalist Mind in a Democratic Age, Penn State UP, 2022
This intimate portrait of a loyalist cleric reveals the entwinement of royalist and Episcopal thought in the American revolutionary age. Eschewing the familiar Enlightenment march to democratic liberalism that often shapes our understandings of the period, Rohrer traces through Chandler’s life countercurrents that provide a fuller picture of how Revolutions grew out of local politics. Rohrer’s account confronts the contingency of history, enabling us to imagine alternative outcomes to a revolutionary era in whose wake Americans still live.
Srinivas Aravamudan Prize: Chair, Valentina Tikoff, with Sarah Benharrech and Blanca Missé
Jacob Myers, “Keeping the Rat-Book: Marly and Visceral Histories of Jamaican Agriculture.” (Early American Literature, Volume 60, Number 1, 2025, pp. 21-41)
This article brilliantly explores what rats and rat-cuisine reveal about agricultural practices, discourses of slavery, and racial tensions in colonial Jamaica. Myers’s contribution is a methodological tour de force in the way it “explores ‘human-animal-plant configurations that challenges the hierarchies separating the lives of estate owners, overseers, and the enslaved.’” Attending to “food’s viscerality,” as Myers proposes and demonstrates in this article, reveals how conflicting politics and colonial ideologies fared when confronting the natural environment and human interactions with it, including as food. The Committee appreciated its archival inventiveness in juxtaposing a white creole novel alongside a Black creole prayer, using the ubiquitous plantation rats as a point of connection.
George E. Haggerty Prize: Chair: Susan Lanser, with Jason Farr and Kristina Straub
The inaugural George E. Haggerty Prize in LGBTQ+ Studies is awarded to: Unsettling Sexuality: Queer Horizons in the Long Eighteenth Century, edited by Jeremy Chow and Shelby Johnson.
This exciting and urgent collection of essays offers new critical frameworks for the study of the queer and trans long eighteenth century by foregrounding Black, Indigenous, Middle Eastern and Asian studies. In addition to the co-editors’ excellent introduction, which conceptualizes the queer and trans eighteenth century through decolonial frameworks, the volume includes thought- provoking chapters by Ula Klein, Johnson, Humberto Garcia, Ziona Kocher, Cailey, Hall, M.A. Miller, Tess J. Given, Nour Afara, and Chow and Riley DeBaecke, along with a brilliant coda by Eugenia Zuroski. The prize committee is particularly inspired by the inclusion of highly original contributions by early-career scholars, an assurance that the future of queer and trans eighteenth- century scholarship is bright. We commend Chow and Johnson for bringing together these important essays.
Innovative Teaching: Chair: Steven Thomas, with Juliette Paul and Linda Troost
Taylin Nelson, PhD. candidate Rice University.
“Coffee, Sex, and Tobacco in 18th-Century Public Culture.”
Race and Empire Caucus Prize
Shruti Jain, “Paper Global Abolition and the Assemblages of Slavery in the Eighteenth Century.”
Shruti Jain’s essay, “Global Abolition and the Assemblages of Slavery in the Eighteenth Century,” interrogates a neat opposition between slavery and freedom. It situates Mariana Starke’s 1788 play Sword of Peace alongside the Parliamentary debates about the abolition of slavery, and the justifications for the East India Company’s continued development of and dependence on unfree labor and peoples. Jain’s essay invites us to attend to what she terms “assemblages of slavery”–a spectrum of unfree labor that emerged and consolidated in the wake of the movement to abolish slavery–and its justification through literary, political, and racial discourses.
In addition to her work in British studies, Jain works on community engaged public humanities projects. She hosts and produces podcasts like The Race and Regency Pod with The Race and Regency Lab and Immigrants Wake America, with the Tenement Museum, New York.
The Graduate Research Prize: Chair: Jonathan Haddad, with Adam Schoene and Helena Yoo-Roth
This year’s Graduate Student Research Prize goes to to Minji Huh, PhD Candidate in English at SUNY Albany, for her essay “Biopolitics, Racialization, and Frankenstein.” Building on previous scholarship on race and Frankenstein’s creature, Huh sharpens and extends that work by situating the creature within the shifting “racializing assemblages” of early-nineteenth-century biology and sociopolitical relations.
The Graduate and Early Career Caucus Mentoring Prize
GECC is happy to award this prize after a four year hiatus to two beloved mentors, chosen by the graduate students on the caucus:
Joseph Roach, Yale University
Ruth Mack, University of Buffalo
Women’s Caucus Prizes
Catharine Macaulay Prize (Graduate Student Paper Prize)
Awardee: Faith Barringer, “The Delineated Breast: Race and the Maternal Body in French Eighteenth Century Portraiture”
Barringer examines the visualization of whiteness in French depictions of breastfeeding women to understand racial stereotypes surrounding motherhood in the eighteenth century. The essay argues that French art rarely depicted Blackness or French colonial realities directly, but instead reinforced racial categories by idealizing white motherhood and marginalizing Black women’s maternal roles. Through meticulous analysis of portraits of breastfeeding women, Barringer reveals how visual representations contributed to stereotypes about motherhood and racial identity, excluding Black women from the ideal of nurturing maternal care. The committee found the paper to be exceptionally well-written and compelling, with a particularly strong analysis of the construction of whiteness in French art and an innovative contribution to current debates about gender and colonialism.
Committee 2025-2026: Jacob Myers, Natasha Shoory, Fauve Vandenberghe
Editing and Translation Fellowship
Awardee: Aleksondra Hultquist, who is editing Volume 6 of The Cambridge Edition of the Writings of Aphra Behn on Behn’s Love-Letters between a Nobleman and his Sister.
Aleksondra Hultquist has undertaken a Cambridge Edition of an especially challenging text, Aphra Behn’s Love-Letters between a Nobleman and his Sister. A multi-volume novel rooted in historical figures and sexual scandal, Love-Letters entails annotation of complex political, literary, legal, and cultural contexts in an exhaustive manner that opens portals for other researchers; a substantial, authoritative introduction; and textual corrections and amendments. The Prize will support in-person collaboration with her co-editor, Elaine Hobby, facilitating more rapid progress on this multi-year project. The result—a richly annotated edition of a novel by a woman writer central to our field, highlighting the deeply gendered experiences of women characters—befits the Women’s Caucus’s mission and is very worthy of its support.
Committee 2025-2026, Kathleen Lubey, Juliette Paul, Heather Heckman-McKenna
Émilie Du Châtelet Award
Awardee: Karenza Sutton-Bennett, “The Female Intellect: Emerging Counterpublics of
Informally Educated Women Reading Periodicals in the Eighteenth Century.”
The committee is delighted to award the 2026 Emilie du Châtelet prize to Dr Karenza Sutton-Bennett for her project, “The Female Intellect: Emerging Counterpublics of Informally Educated Women Reading Periodicals in the Eighteenth Century.” The committee was particularly excited by the prospect of such an important intervention and corrective to traditionally male-centered ideas about the Enlightenment and the recognition of the contribution made by largely self-taught women between the middle
and end of the eighteenth century. Dr Sutton-Bennett’s clarity about the need for recognition of the role that women’s periodical literature played in this contribution as well as the importance of greater access to this periodical literature makes clear the immense value of Dr Sutton-Bennett’s body of work. The Women’s Caucus is pleased to help support the continuation of this work, and we all look forward to reading Dr
Sutton-Bennett’s book when it is published in the future, as we are sure it will be.
Committee 2025-2026, Kelly Plante, Jennifer Golightly, Kimary Fick
The Women’s Caucus Intersectional Prize
Awardee: Elena Deanda-Camacho, “Colonial America, Sexuality, and the Centering of the Margins”
Elena Deanda-Camacho’s work is situated in the archives and draws on sexual politics of the eighteenth-century, postcolonial and intersectional approaches. This project offers a transnational lens for current scholarship on 18th-century censorship and definitions of obscenity. The inclusion of Afro-Mexican subjects is an underserved topic in eighteenth-century studies that Dr. Deanda-Camacho’s work brings more attention to.The scope of their work is wide but their focus is specific. This is precisely the kind of project the Intersectionality Prize was made for!
Committee 2025-2026: Lillian Lu, Emily Kugler, Misty Krueger