James L. Clifford Prize

James L. Clifford Prize Recipients

The James L. Clifford Prize recognizes an article that presents an outstanding study of some aspect of eighteenth-century culture, interesting to any eighteenth-century specialist, regardless of discipline.

2024

Lisa Forman Cody, “‘Marriage is No Protection for Crime’: Coverture, Sex, and Marital Rape in Eighteenth-Century England,” Journal of British Studies, 61.

Honorable Mention:

Ramesh Mallipeddi, “Roads, Bridges, and Ports: Infrastructures of Plantation Agriculture in the British Caribbean, 1627-1840,” in The Aesthetic Life of Infrastructure, eds. Kelly M. Rich, Nicole M. Rizzuto, and Susan Zieger (Northwestern UP, 2023).

Nana Osei Quarshie, “Spiritual Pawning: ‘Mad Slaves’ and Mental Healing in Atlantic-Era West Africa,” in Comparative Studies of Society and History, 65.3.

2023

Terry F. Robinson, for “Deaf Education and the Rise of English Melodrama,” Essays in Romanticism 29.1.

Honorable Mention: Cassidy Holahan, “Rummaging in the Dark: ECCO as Opaque Digital Archive,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 54.4

2022

Alan S. Ross, “The Animal Body as Medium: Taxidermy and European Expansion, 1775-1865,” Past & Present (November 2020).

Honorable Mention:

Elizabeth Ellis, “The Natchez War Revisited: Violence, Multinational Settlements, and Indigenous Diplomacy in the Lower Mississippi Valley,” William and Mary Quarterly (July 2020). 

2021

Spencer J. Weinreich, “Unaccountable Subjects: Contracting Legal and Medical Authority in the Newgate Smallpox Experiment (1721)”, History Workshop Journal (Spring 2020).

Honorable Mention:

Rachael Wheeler and Sarah Eyerly, “Singing Box 331: Re-sounding Eighteenth-Century Mohican Hymns from the Moravian Archives,” The William and Mary Quarterly (Fall 2019)

James Mulholland, “Translocal Anglo-India and the Multilingual Reading Public,” PMLA, March 2020.

2020

Avi Lifschitz, “The Book of Job and the Sex Life of Elephants: The Limits of Evidential Credibility in Eighteenth-Century Natural History and Biblical Criticism,” Journal of Modern History December 2019.

2019

Katie L. Jarvis, “The Cost of Female Citizenship: How Price Controls Gendered Democracy in Revolutionary France.” French Historical Studies 41:4 (October 2018)

Honorable Mention:

Holly Brewer, “Slavery, Sovereignty, and “Inheritable Blood”: Reconsidering John Locke and the Origins of American Slavery.” American Historical Review (October 2017)

2018

Richard Taws, “Conté’s Machines: Drawing, Atmosphere, Erasure.” Oxford Art Journal 39:2 (2016)

2017

David Brewer, “Rethinking Fictionality in the Eighteenth-Century Puppet Theatre.” In The Afterlives of Eighteenth-Century Fiction, ed. Daniel Cook and Nicholas Seager (Cambridge UP, 2015).

2016

Aaron Wile, “Watteau, Reverie and Selfhood.” The Art Bulletin XVCI:3 (September 2014)

2015

Paola Bertucci, “Enlightened Secrets: Silk, Intelligent Travel, and Industrial Espionage in Eighteenth Century France.” Technology and Culture 54:4 (October 2013)

2014

Melissa Mowry, “Past Remembrance or History: Aphra Behn’s The Widdow Ranter or How the Collective Lost its Honor.” ELH 79 (2012)

2013

Rebecca Messbarger, “The Rebirth of Venus in Florence’s Royal Museum of Physics and Natural History.” Journal of the History of Collections (2012)

2012

Melinda Rabb, “Parting Shots: Eighteenth-Century Displacements of the Male Body at War.” ELH 78 (2011)

2011

Andrew Curran, “Rethinking Race History: The Role of the Albino in the French Enlightenment Life Sciences.” History and Theory 48 (October 2009)

Pekka Hämäläinen, “The Politics of Grass: European Expansion, Ecological Change, and Indigenous Power in the Southwest Borderlands.” William and Mary Quarterly LXCII:2 (April 2010)

2010

Suzanne Desan, “Translatlantic Spaces of Revolution: The French Revolution, Sciotomanie, and American Lands.” Journal of Early Modern History 12 (2008)

2009

Sean R. Silver, “Locke’s Pineapple and the History of Taste.” The Eighteenth Century 49:1 (2008)

Honorable Mention: Richard Taws, “Trompe-l’Oeil and Trauma: Money and Memory after the Terror.” Oxford Art Journal 30:3 (2007)

2008

Catherine Molineux, “Pleasures of the Smoke: “Black Virginians” in Georgian London’s Tobacco Shops.” William and Mary Quarterly

William A. Pettigrew, “Free to Enslave: Politics and the Escalation of Britain’s Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1688-1717.” William and Mary Quarterly

2007

Lauren Clay, “Provincial Actors, the Comédie-Française, and the Business of Performing in Eighteenth-Century France.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 38:4 (Summer 2005)

Mike Goode, “Blakespotting.” PMLA 121:3 (May 2006)

2006

Sarah Cohen, “Chardin’s Fur: Painting, Materialism and the Question of Animal Soul.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 38:1 (Fall 2004)

Lynn Festa, “Personal Effect: Wigs and Possessive Individualism in the Long Eighteenth Century.” Eighteenth-Century Life 29:2 (Spring 2005)

2005

Mark Blackwell, “Extraneous Bodies: The Contagion of Live-Tooth Transplantation in Late Eighteenth-Century England.” Eighteenth-Century Life 28:1 (Winter 2004)

Honorable Mention: Charlotte Sussman, “The Colonial Afterlife of Political Arithmetic: Swift, Demography and Mobile Populations.” Cultural Critique 56, Winter 2004

Jeremy D. Popkin, “Facing Racial Revolution: Captivity Narratives and Identity in the Saint-Dominque Insurrection.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 36:4 (Summer 2003)

Michael Kwass, “Consumption and the World of Ideas.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 37:2 (Winter 2004)

2004

Gregory S. Brown, “Reconsidering Censorship of Writers in Eighteenth-Century France. Civility, State Power, and the Public Theater in the Enlightenment” Journal of Modern History 75 (June 2003)

2003

Georgia Cowart, “Watteau’s Pilgrimage to Cythera and the Subversive Utopia of the

Opera-Ballet.” The Art Bulletin 83:3 (2001)

2002

A. Roger Ekirch, “Sleep We have Lost: Pre-Industrial Slumber in the British Isles.” The American Historical Review 106:2 (April 2001)

2001

Dror Wahrman, “Gender in Translation: How the English Wrote Their Juvenal, 1644-

1815.” Representations 65

2000

John Crowley, “The Sensibility of Comfort.” The American Historical Review 104:3 (1999)

1999

James Schmidt, “Cabbage Heads and Gulps of Water: Hegel on the Terror.” Political

Theory 26 (1998)

1998

Holly Brewer, “Entailing Aristocracy in Colonial Virginia: “Ancient Feudal Restraints and Revolutionary Reform.” William and Mary Quarterly (April 1997)

1997

Mark Salber Phillips, “Reconsiderations on History and Antiquarianism: Arnaldo Momigliano and the Historiography of Eighteenth-Century Britain.” Journal of the History of Ideas 57:2 (April 1996)

1996

Julia Douthwaite, “Rewriting the Savage: The Extraordinary Fictions of the ‘Wild Girl of Champagne.”’ Eighteenth-Century Studies 28:2 (Winter 1994-95)

Honorable Mention: Michael McKeon, “Historicizing Patriarchy: The Emergence of Gender Difference in England, 1660-1760.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 28:3 (Spring 1995)

1995

Christie McDonald, “The Anxiety of Change: Reconfiguring Family Relations in Beaumarchais’s Trilogy.” Modern Language Quarterly: A Journal of Literary History (March 1994)

Honorable Mention: Linda Merians, “What They Are, Who We Are: Representations of the ‘Hottentot’ in Eighteenth-Century Britain.” Eighteenth-Century Life (November 1993)

1994

Dennis Todd, “The Hairy Maid at the Harpsichord: Some Speculations on the Meanings of Gulliver’s Travels.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language (Summer 1992)

1993

Trevor Ross, “Copyright and the Invention of Tradition.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 26:1 (Fall 1992)

1992

Regina Janes, “Beheadings.” Representations (Summer 1991)

1991

William Epstein, “Counter-Intelligence: Cold-War Criticism and Eighteenth-Century Studies.” ELH 57:1 (Spring 1990)

1990

Bernadette Fort, “Voice of the Public: The Carnivalization of Salon Art in Prerevolutionary Pamphlets.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 22:3 (Spring 1989)

1989

Daniel W. Howe, “The Political Psychology of The Federalist.” William and Mary Quarterly (July 1987)

1988

Terry Castle, “The Female Thermometer.” Representations (Winter 1987)

1987

Syndy McMillen Conger, “The Sorrows of Young Charlotte: Werther’s English Sisters, 1785-1805.” Goethe Yearbook (Spring 1986)

G.S. Rousseau, “The Pursuit of Homosexuality in the Eighteenth Century: ‘Utterly Confused Category’ and/or Rich Repository?” Eighteenth-Century Life (May 1985)

1986

Joseph M. Levine, “The Battle of the Books and the Shield of Achilles.” Eighteenth-Century

Life (October 1984)

1985

John Barrell, “The Functions of Art in a Commercial Society: The Writings of James Barry.” The Eighteenth Century 25:2 (Spring 1984)

1984

Frederick Bogel, “Dulness Unbound: Rhetoric and Pope’s Dunciad,” PMLA (October 1982)

1983

Joel H. Baer, “’The Complicated Plot of Piracy’: Aspects of English Criminal Law and the Image of the Pirate in Defoe.” The Eighteenth-Century: Theory and Interpretation (Winter 1982)

1982

Calvin Seerveld, “Telltale Statues in Watteau’s Painting.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 14:2 (Winter 1980-81)

1981

Isaac Kramnick, “Children’s Literature and Bourgeois Ideology: Observations on Culture and Industrial Capitalism in the Later Eighteenth Century.” In Culture and Politics from Puritanism to the Enlightenment, ed. Perez Zagorin (University of California Press, 1980).

1980

Carole Fabricant, “Binding and Dressing Nature’s Loose Tresses: The Ideology of Augustan Landscape Design.” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, ed. Roseann Runte (University of Wisconsin Press, 1979)

1979

Barbara Maria Stafford, “Toward Romantic Landscape Perception: Illustrated Travels and the Rise of Singularity as an Aesthetic Category.” The Art Quarterly (Autumn 1977)

1978

Judith Colton, “Merlin’s Cave and Queen Caroline: Garden Art as Political Propaganda.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 10:1 (Fall 1976)