2025 Walker Cowen Manuscript Prize Competition in Eighteenth-Century Studies

We invite submissions for the Walker Cowen Memorial Prize. The prize is awarded to the author of a scholarly book-length manuscript in eighteenth-century studies, including the Americas and the Atlantic world. Submissions may be in history (including history of science), literature, philosophy, or the arts. The competition is held annually. The winner of the Cowen Prize will receive a $5,000 award and will be offered an advance publishing contract by the University of Virginia Press. The prize honors the late Walker Cowen, second Director of the Press from 1969 until his death in 1987. Click here for an official application form. 

Request an application form or send queries to: Angie Hogan The University of Virginia Press PO Box 400318 Charlottesville, VA 22904-4318 arh2h@virginia.edu 

Application deadline To be considered for the 2025 award, manuscripts should be submitted no later than November 1, 2024. Manuscripts will not be returned. Foreign-language works first published in Europe will also be considered for the prize and for translation into English. Announcement of the winning manuscript will be made in April 2025. 

Previous Winners

Christopher R. Pearl Declarations of Independence: Indigenous Resilience, Colonial Rivalries, and the Cost of Revolution

Rebekah Mitsein African Impressions: How African Worldviews Shaped the British Geographical Imagination across the Early Enlightenment

Thomas Salem Manganaro Against Better Judgment: Irrational Action and Literary Invention in the Long Eighteenth Century

Scott M. Sanders Voices from Beyond: Physiology, Sentience, and the Uncanny in Eighteenth-Century French Literature

Erin Drew The Usufructuary Ethos: Power, Politics, and Environment in the Long Eighteenth Century

Michael B. Prince The Shortest Way with Defoe: Robinson Crusoe, Deism, and the Novel 

Melissa J. Ganz Public Vows: Fictions of Marriage in the English Enlightenment 

Rahul Markovits Staging Civilization: A Transnational History of French Theater in Eighteenth-Century Europe

Lawrence B. A. Hatter Citizens of Convenience: The Imperial Origins of American Nationhood on the U.S.-Canada Border 

Courtney Weiss Smith Empiricist Devotions: Science, Religion, and Poetry in Early Eighteenth-Century England 

Christopher Tozzi Nationalizing France's Army: Foreign, Black, and Jewish Troops in the French Military, 1715-1831 

Jacob Sider Jost Prose Immortality, 1711-1819 

Denver Brunsman The Evil Necessity: British Naval Impressment in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World 

Scott R. MacKenzie Be It Ever So Humble: Poverty, Fiction, and the Invention of the Middle-Class Home 

Francesca Saggini Backstage in the Novel: Frances Burney and the Theater Arts 

James D. Drake The Nation’s Nature: How Continental Presumptions Gave Rise to the United State of America 

Theresa Braunschneider Our Coquettes: Capacious Desire in the Eighteenth Century 

Jewel L. Spangler Virginians Reborn: Anglican Monopoly, Evangelical Dissent, and the Rise of the Baptists in the Late Eighteenth Century 

Howard G. Brown Ending the French Revolution: Violence, Justice, and Repression from the Terror to Napoleon 

Richard Nash Wild Enlightenment: The Borders of Human Identity in the Eighteenth Century 

Suvir Kaul Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire: English Verse in the Long Eighteenth Century 

Lisa Jane Graham If the King Only Knew: Seditious Speech in the Reign of Louis XV 

Catherine Cusset No Tomorrow: The Ethics of Pleasure in the French Enlightenment 

Elizabeth Wanning Harries The Unfinished Manner: Essays on the Fragment in the Later Eighteenth Century