Kenshur Prize Winner Announced

Press Release

It is with great pleasure that the Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies at Indiana University Bloomington announces the eleventh winner of the Kenshur Prize for an outstanding monograph of interest to eighteenth-century scholars:

Amanda Jo Goldstein, Sweet Science: Romantic Materialism and the New Logics of Life, (University of Chicago Press, 2017).

Amanda Jo Goldstein's Sweet Science: Romantic Materialism and the New Logics of Life is a tour-de-force of interdisciplinary scholarship. In its subject matter it ranges deftly from Blake's mythology to Goethe's morphological writings to Kant's metaphysics to the early Marx. In its conceptual concerns it ranges equally deftly from Lucretian materialism to Romantic figuration to post-classical physics to contemporary ontogeny. This book truly exemplifies the values and scholarly aspirations long promoted by the Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

The prize is named in honor of the work of Oscar Kenshur, professor emeritus of comparative literature at Indiana University, a dix-huitièmiste par excellence, former Chicago cab driver, and one of the founding members of the Center. It has been awarded annually since 2007. For more information, see here.

The prize will be awarded on November 2, 2018, 4-7 pm, in the University Club of the Indiana University Memorial Union, 900 E 7th Street, Bloomington, Indiana.

The other finalists for the prize were: Paola Bertucci, Artisanal Enlightenment: Science and the Mechanical Arts in Old Regime France (Yale University Press); James Delbourgo, Collecting the World: Hans Sloane and the Origins of the British Museum (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press); Stefani Engelstein, Sibling Action: The Genealogical Structure of Modernity (Columbia University Press); andChristy Pichichero, The Military Enlightenment: War and Culture in the French Empire from Louis XIV to Napoleon (Cornell University Press).

The prize committee consisted of Clare Haru Crowston (University of Illinois), Jesse Molesworth (Indiana University), and Johannes Türk (Indiana University).

To be eligible for next year's prize, a book must carry a 2018 copyright. Submissions in English from any discipline (irrespective of author's citizenship or place of residence) are welcome; authors (as well as publishers) are invited to nominate relevant works. Multi-authored collections of essays and translations, as well as books by members of the Bloomington faculty, are not eligible. Deadline for nominations is Feb. 15, 2019.

For all questions, please contact Fritz Breithaupt, acting director of the Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies, at fbreitha@indiana.edu.