Winner: 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.