ASECS Archive
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.
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); and 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)