Catharine Macaulay Prize (Graduate Student Paper Prize)
Deadline: September 15
Prize: $1000
The Catharine Macaulay Prize is an annual award made by the ASECS Women’s Caucus for the best graduate student paper on a feminist or gender studies subject presented at the ASECS Annual Meeting or any of the ASECS regional meetings during the academic year. The submission should be the paper presented at the conference without expansion or significant revision.
To be eligible for the prize, papers must advance the understanding of gender dynamics, women’s experience, and/or women's contributions to eighteenth-century culture, or offer a feminist analysis of any aspect of eighteenth-century culture and/or society. Projects typically fall within the period of 1660-1820 though projects spanning a longer time period will also be considered.
The prize carries an award of $1000 and an invitation for the winner to revise their paper for publication in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture. A sample essay can be found here.
The prize winner will be notified of the award after the prize committee makes their decision in the fall, and the prize will be publicly announced at the following year’s annual ASECS meeting at the Women's Caucus luncheon. Historically, the winner of the prize has served on the prize selection committee for the subsequent two year(s).
Please submit your paper here.
Deadline: September 15
Prize: $1000
The Catharine Macaulay Prize is an annual award made by the ASECS Women’s Caucus for the best graduate student paper on a feminist or gender studies subject presented at the ASECS Annual Meeting or any of the ASECS regional meetings during the academic year. The submission should be the paper presented at the conference without expansion or significant revision.
To be eligible for the prize, papers must advance the understanding of gender dynamics, women’s experience, and/or women's contributions to eighteenth-century culture, or offer a feminist analysis of any aspect of eighteenth-century culture and/or society. Projects typically fall within the period of 1660-1820 though projects spanning a longer time period will also be considered.
The prize carries an award of $1000 and an invitation for the winner to revise their paper for publication in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture. A sample essay can be found here.
The prize winner will be notified of the award after the prize committee makes their decision in the fall, and the prize will be publicly announced at the following year’s annual ASECS meeting at the Women's Caucus luncheon. Historically, the winner of the prize has served on the prize selection committee for the subsequent two year(s).
Please submit your paper here.
The Catharine Macaulay Prize Winner for 2024: Natasha Shoory, “Toilettes and Telescopes: Publicising Women’s Domestic Spaces and Collections in Eighteenth-Century Paris"
Based on extensive archival research of auction catalogues, this essay highlights the role of women collectors in eighteenth-century France and the importance of a specific, under-discussed historical figure: Marie-Anne Bigot de Graveron, Présidente de Bandeville. Grounding her argument in a discussion of the gendered nature of terms such as amateur and curieux, Shoory demonstrates de Bandville’s importance in the collecting world of her time and suggests that “the hesitation of Bandeville’s contemporaries to include other women amongst amateurs has no doubt affected scholarly studies of eighteenth-century collections of their owners to the present day.” Shoory’s essay thus does the important work of both putting forward its own argument and also opening up new avenues for research on eighteenth-century women collectors. Overall, the committee was impressed with how thoroughly Shoory embeds her argument in both its own historical context and current debates in the field of art history, making her contribution to the field explicit and clear.
Past Winners
- 2023 Fauve Vandenberge: “Frances Brooke's Queer Forms in The Old Maid (1755-56)
- 2022: Ziona Kocker, "The 'Pretty Young Gentleman': Age, Embodiment, and Queerness in The Country Wife"
- 2021: no prize given.
- 2020: Rachel Gevlin, "Voluntary Celibates; Or, Why Sir Charles Grandison is (a) No Wanker"
- 2019: Bethany Qualls, "Talking Statues, Treasonous Bishops, and Grave Robbery: Creating the Celebrated Sally Salisbury’s Print Afterlives”
- Honorable mention: Erin A. Spampinato, “The Origins of the Rape-As-Aberration Plot; or, was Samuel Richardson a Second Wave Feminist?”
- 2018: Kate Ozment, "Book History, Women, and the Canon: Theorizing Feminist Bibliography"
- Honorable mention: Paris Spies-Gans, "'Exercising it as a profession': The Rise of the Female Artist in London and Paris, 1760-1815"
- 2017: Cassie Childs, "Eating Local: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Italian Garden"
- 2016: Lauren Miskin, "Stitching Selfhood: Late Eighteenth-Century Samplers and the Crafting of British Femininity"
- 2015: Rachael Schaffner, "Matters of Imag(in)ed Memory and Happy Forgetting in Frances Burney's Camilla"
- 2014: Megan Hunt, "Women Without History"
- Honorable Mentions:
- Michael Nicholson, "A Singular Experiment"
- Arelene Leis, "Intellectual Collecting as Sociable Display"
- 2013: Glenda Goodman, “The Economy of Accomplishment: Aesthetics and Labor in Women’s Musical Lives”
- 2012: Kate Hamilton, “She ‘came up Stairs into the World’: Elizabeth Barry and Restoration Celebrity”
- 2011: Susan Muse, “From Femme Covert to Feme Overt: Public Justice in Eliza Haywood’s The Distress’d Orphan” and Edward Kozaczka, “Queer Gardens: Cultivating Desire in Penelope Aubin’s Lucinda"
- 2010: Julia H. Fawcett, "Charlotte Charke and the Over-Expression of Gender"
- 2009: Caroline Wigginton, "Faithful Translations: Reconsidering Coosaponakeesa's Acts of Interpretive Authorship on the Creek Frontier"
- 2008: Sonja Boon, "Does a Dutiful Wife Write, or, Should Suzanna Get Divorced? Reflections on Suzanne Cuchod Necker, Divorce, and the Construction of the Biological Subject"
- 2007: JoEllen DeLucia, "'Beyond the Narrow House': The Ossian Poems, Gender, and Empire"
- 2006: No prize given.
- 2005: No prize given.
- 2004: Elizabeth Bennet, "Divergent Paths to Virtue in the Lives and Writings of Elizabeth Carter and Catherine Talbot"
- 2003: Melissa Ganz, "Moll Flanders and English Marriage Law"
- 2002: Andrew Piper, "Lost in Translation: German Women Translators around 1800"
- 2001: Jord/ana Rosenberg, "The Bosom of the Bourgeoisie"
- 2000: Anita de Freitas Boe, "'Neither Is It All Becoming': Edmund Burke's A Philosophic Enquiry, the Beautiful, and the Disciplining of Desire"
- 1999: Theresa Ann Smith, "The Proposal for a Female National Dress in Eighteenth-Century Spain"
- 1998: Lisa Zunshine: "'What door would it open to scandal...': Female Philanthropy and the London Foundling Hospitals"
- 1997: Elizabeth Child, "Geography, Gender, and Print Culture: [Re]Locating England's Provincial Women Writers"
- 1996: Mary Catherine Moran, "Eighteenth-Century Conduct Literature and Scottish Conjectural History on the Role of Women in the Progress of Mankind"
- 1995: Melissa Hyde, "Ambiguities of Gender Identity in François Boucher's Pastoral Paintings"
- 1994: Rebecca Messbarger, "Masked Resistance: A Woman's Defense of Women's Education in Eighteenth-Century Italy"
- 1993: Alessa Johns, "Engendering Utopias: Examples from Mid-Eighteenth-Century England"
- 1992: Charlotte Sussman, "Consuming Anxieties: Women and the Politics of Sugar, 1792"