Skip to content

Louis Gottschalk Prize

Deadline: November 15, 2024

The Louis Gottschalk Prize recognizes an outstanding historical or critical study on the eighteenth century and carries an award of $1,000. Louis Gottschalk (1899-1975) was the second President of ASECS, a President of the American Historical Association, and for many years Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago; his scholarship exemplified the humanistic ideals that this award is meant to encourage. Previous awardees can be found at the bottom of this page.

Rules:

  • Scholarly books—including commentaries, critical studies, biographies, collections of essays by a single author, and critical editions—written in any modern language are eligible. Books that are primarily translations or multi-authored collections of essays are not eligible.
  • To be eligible for this year’s competition, a book must have a copyright date between 1 November 2023 and 31 October 2024.
  • The author must be a member of the Society at the time of submission. 

Normally, submissions for the Gottschalk prize are in English. Works written in languages other than English are permitted, but it may not be possible for the prize committee to assess these works. Please contact the Business Office for further information.

In order to make a submission, publishers must follow this process for each volume they intend to submit:

1) Complete a copy of the online submission form. Completing the submission form by the deadline will be considered an on-time submission if the book arrives within a week of the deadline.

If completing the form would provide an obstacle to submission, please contact the Executive Director for an alternate format.

2) Send a copy of each book for consideration to each committee member, as well as one to the ASECS business office, at the addresses listed below before the deadline of Nov. 15, 2024.

  • ASECS Business Office / 2397 NW Kings Blvd. PMB 114 / Corvallis, OR 97330
  • Committee:
    • Chair, Elaine McGirr: Department of Theatre / University of Bristol / Cantocks Close / Bristol BS8 1UP / United Kingdom
    • Melissa Mowry / 2102 Woodland Road / Abington, PA 19001
    • Amelia Rauser / Department of Visual Arts / Franklin & Marshall College / 415 Harrisburg Ave. / Lancaster PA 17603-3004

For questions, please contact the committee chair or ASECS Executive Director Benita Blessing (director@asecs.org)

Louis Gottschalk Prize Recipients

2020-2029 Gottschalk Prize Winners

2023-24 – April G. Shelford, A Caribbean Enlightenment: Intellectual Life in the British and French Colonial Worlds, 1750-1792 (Cambridge University Press)

2022-23 – Joan DeJean, Mutinous Women: How French Convicts Became Founding Mothers of the Gulf Coast (Basic Books, 2022)

2021-22 – José Francisco Robles, Polemics, Literature, and Knowledge in Eighteenth-Century Mexico: A New World for the Republic of Letters (Liverpool University Press / Voltaire Foundation, University of Oxford)

2020-21 – Dustin Stewart, Futures of Enlightenment Poetry (Oxford University Press)

2010-2019 Gottschalk Winners

2019-20 – Katie Jarvis, Politics in the Marketplace: Work, Gender, and Citizenship in Revolutionary France (Oxford University Press)

2018-19 – Paola Bertucci, Artisanal Enlightenment: Science and the Mechanical Arts in Old Regime France (Yale University Press)

2017-18 – James DelbourgoCollecting the World: Hans Sloane and the Origins of the British Museum (Harvard University Press)

2016-17 – John O’Brien, Literature Incorporated: The Cultural Unconscious of the Business Corporation, 1650–1850 (University of Chicago Press)

2015-16 – Rebecca Spang, Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution (Harvard University Press) — Honorable Mention to Susan S. Lanser, The Sexuality of History: Modernity and the Sapphic, 1565–1830 (University of Chicago Press)

2014-15 – Vittoria Di Palma, Wasteland: A History (Yale University Press)

2013-14 – William B. Warner, Protocols of Liberty: Communication, Innovation and the American Revolution (University of Chicago Press)

2012-13 – Nicholas D. Paige, Before Fiction: The Ancien Regime of the Novel (University of Pennsylvania Press)

2011-12 – David Eltis and David Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Yale University Press)

2010-11 – Margaret Cohen, The Novel and the Sea (Princeton University Press)

2000-2009 Gottschalk Winners

2000-01 – Rebecca L. Spang, The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture (Harvard University Press, 2000)

2001-02 – Daniel K. RichterFacing East from Indian Country (Harvard University Press, 2001)

2002-03 – Ellen T. Harris, Handel as Orpheus: Voice and Desire in the Chamber Cantatas (Harvard University Press)

2003-04 – Mary Terrall, The Man Who Flattened the Earth (University of Chicago Press)

2004-05 – Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (Yale University Press, 2004)

2005-06 – David Marshall, The Frame of Art: Fictions of Aesthetic Experience, 1750–1815 (Johns Hopkins University Press)

2006-07 – Martin Brückner, The Geographic Revolution in Early America (University of North Carolina Press) — Honorable Mention to Michael McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge (Johns Hopkins University Press)

2007-08 – David A. BellThe First Total War (Houghton Mifflin Company)

2008-09 – Vincent BrownThe Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Harvard University Press)

2009-10 – David Hancock, Oceans of Wine: Madeira and the Emergence of American Trade and Taste (Yale University Press)

1990-1999 Gottschalk Winners

1999-2000 – Mary PooveyA History of the Modern Fact (The University of Chicago Press)

1998-99 – Adrian JohnsThe Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (The University of Chicago Press)

1997-98 – Stuart Sherman, Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and English Diurnal Form 1660–1785 (The University of Chicago Press)

1996-97 – Steven L. KaplanThe Bakers of Paris and the Bread Question 1700–1775 (Cornell University Press)

1995-96 – Susan Juster, Disorderly Women: Sexual Politics and Evangelicalism in Revolutionary New England (University of Michigan)

1994-95 – Daniel Vickers, Farmers and Fishermen: Two Centuries of Work in Essex County, Massachusetts, 1630-1850 (The University of North Carolina Press)

1993-94 – Gananath ObeyesekereThe Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific (Princeton University Press) — Honorable Mention to Madelyn Gutwirth, The Twilight of the Goddesses: Women and Representation in the French Revolutionary Era (Rutgers University Press)

1991-93 – Shared by Joseph M. Levine, The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age (Cornell University Press) and Barbara Maria StaffordBody Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (MIT Press)

1990-91 – J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (W.W. Norton)

1980-1989 Gottschalk Winners

1989-90 – Shared by Felicity A. NussbaumThe Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century England (Johns Hopkins University Press) and Jeremy D. Popkin, News and Politics in the Age of Revolution (Cornell University Press)

1988-89 – Damie Stillman, English Neo-Classical Architecture. 2 Vols. (Zwemmer)

1987-88 – John Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-Century England (University of Chicago Press)

1986-87 – J. M. BeattieCrime and the Courts in England, 1660–1800 (Princeton University Press)

1985-86 – Michael Mooney, Vico in the Tradition of Rhetoric (Princeton University Press)

1984-85 – David B. MorrisAlexander Pope: The Genius of Sense (Harvard University Press)

1983-84 – Irvin EhrenpreisSwift: The Man, His Work, and the Age (Harvard University Press)

1982-83 – John Sitter, Literary Loneliness in Mid-Eighteenth-Century England (Cornell University Press)

1981-82 – H.C. Robbins LandonHaydn: A Documentary Study (Rizzoli International Publications)

1980-81 – Michael FriedAbsorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (University of California Press)

1976-1979 Gottschalk Winners

1979-80 – James L. Clifford, Dictionary Johnson: Samuel Johnson’s Middle Years (McGraw-Hill)

1978-79 – Morris R. Brownell, Alexander Pope and the Arts of Georgian England (Clarendon Press)

1977-78 – John G.A. PocockThe Political Writings of James Harrington (Cambridge University Press)

1976-77 – Margaret C. JacobThe Newtonians and the English Revolution, 1689–1720 (Cornell University Press)

See also: