Enfilade

A selection of this year’s ASECS awards that particularly relate to landscapes, images, objects, and material culture:

2014–15 Louis Gottschalk Prize
Vittoria Di Palma, Wasteland: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014).
The American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies awards annually the Louis Gottschalk prize to the best scholarly book on an eighteenth-century subject. The 2015 Gottschalk prize has been awarded to Vittoria Di Palma for Wasteland: A History (Yale University Press, 2014), an elegant, probing, and timely account of how the emerging discourse of modern aesthetics in Britain was inseparably intertwined with interest in certain ‘unimproved’ types of land. Di Palma’s work, which conjoins the resources of art history, landscape and garden studies, the history of science, and more disciplines still, is a scholarly tour-de-force that synthesizes disparate studies of subjects ranging from land enclosure to the sublime in order to shed new light on the prehistory of our current ecological challenges.

2014–15 James L. Clifford Prize
Paola Bertucci, “Enlightened Secrets: Silk Intelligent Travel, and Industrial Espionage in Eighteenth-Century France” published in Technology and Culture 54 (October 2013): 820–52.
Bertucci offers a critical examination of the relationship between the openness of academic knowledge and the secrecy of state affairs in the age of Enlightenment. Using the silk manufacturing industry of France and Piedmont as an example, she explores the ways in which technical intelligence was gathered under the guise of academic exchange and demonstrates that the seeming openness of academic culture was one of the resources that intelligent travelers mobilized to serve the state in secret.

2014–15 Women’s Caucus Editing and Translation Fellowship
There were five very fine submissions this year for the Women’s Caucus Editing and Translation Prize. The selection committee—which consisted of Katherine Binhammer, Katharine Kittredge, and Mary Trouille (Chair)—was especially impressed by the proposals submitted by Aileen Douglas and Catherine Sama. Since no prize was given last year, the Women’s Caucus kindly agreed to allow our committee to award a $1,000 prize to both Professors Douglas and Sama. Catherine Sama is Professor of Italian at the University of Rhode Island in Providence. She has published widely on eighteenth-century Italian women writers and artists. The title of her project is “Rosalba Carriera (1673–1757): Correspondence of a Venetian Artist.”

2014–15 Innovative Course Design Competition
Michael Gavin, “Modeling Literary History: Quantitative Approaches to the Enlightenment”
Estelle Joubert, “Music in the Global Eighteenth Century: A New Course Proposal”
Sean Silver, “The Novel and the Museum”