The Laura Shannon Prize in Contemporary European Studies is a $10,000 book prize sponsored by the Nanovic Institute for European Studies at the University of Notre Dame. The Laura Shannon Prize is awarded annually to the author of the "best book in European studies that transcends a focus on any one country, state, or people to stimulate new ways of thinking about contemporary Europe as a whole." [1] "Contemporary" is construed broadly, and books about particular countries or regions have done well in the process so long as there are implications for the remainder of Europe. The prize alternates between the humanities and history/social sciences. Nominations are typically due at the end of January each year and may be made by either authors or publishers. The final jury selects one book as the winner each year and has the discretion to award honorable mentions.
Past final jurors have included international scholars holding a number of significant academic positions, including the following:
Brad Stephan Gregory holds the Dorothy G. Griffin Collegiate Chair in European History at the University of Notre Dame. After spending the spring 2002 semester as a visiting scholar with the Erasmus Institute at Our Lady's University, Gregory came to Notre Dame in 2003 after teaching at Stanford University, where he received early tenure in 2001. He became a full professor of history at Notre Dame in 2012. Gregory formerly served as the director of the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Studies, which was founded in 2008, from 2013 to 2019. Together with Randall C. Zachman, Gregory also serves as the North American editor of the Archive for Reformation History.
Mark Allan Noll is an American historian specializing in the history of Christianity in the United States. He holds the position of Research Professor of History at Regent College, having previously been Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. Noll is a Reformed evangelical Christian and in 2005 was named by Time magazine as one of the twenty-five most influential evangelicals in America.
James R. Otteson is an American philosopher and political economist. He is the John T. Ryan Jr. Professor of Business Ethics at the University of Notre Dame. Formerly, he was the Thomas W. Smith Presidential Chair in Business Ethics, Professor of Economics, and executive director of the Eudaimonia Institute at Wake Forest University. He is also a Senior Scholar at The Fund for American Studies in Washington, D.C., a Research Professor in the Center for the Philosophy of Freedom and in the Philosophy Department at the University of Arizona, a Visitor of Ralston College, a Research Fellow for the Independent Institute in California, a director of Ethics and Economics Education of New England, and a Senior Scholar at the Fraser Institute. He has taught previously at Yeshiva University, New York University, Georgetown University, and the University of Alabama.
The College of Arts and Letters is the oldest and largest college within the University of Notre Dame. The Dean of the College of Arts and Letters is Sarah Mustillo.
Sir Christopher Munro Clark is an Australian historian living in the United Kingdom and Germany. He is the twenty-second Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge. In the 2015 Birthday Honours, he was knighted for his services to Anglo-German relations.
Peter D. Harrison is a Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Notre Dame, Australia, and Professor Emeritus of History and Philosophy at the University of Queensland
Eric Matthew Nelson is an American historian and Professor of Government at Harvard University.
Nanovic Institute for European Forum, the Keeley Vatican Lecture, European film series, lecture series, conferences, symposium, special guest speakers, lunches and others. The Institute offers grants and fellowships, as well as a minor in European Studies for undergraduates at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, USA.
Kate Brown is a Professor of Science, Technology and Society at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the author of Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future (2019), Dispatches from Dystopia (2015), Plutopia (2013), and A Biography of No Place (2004). She was a member of the faculty at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) from 2000 to 2018. She is the founding consulting editor of History Unclassified in the American Historical Review.
Ewa Plonowska Ziarek is the Julian Park Professor of Comparative Literature at The State University of New York at Buffalo. She has a major interest in engaging with other scholars on their own terms, and believes that a model of dissensus in philosophy, rather than the traditional consensus model, may produce highly valuable results.
Omar Lizardo is an American sociologist who is LeRoy Neiman Term Chair Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. He was previously professor of sociology at the University of Notre Dame (2006–2018), and co-editor of the American Sociological Review. In 2020, Lizardo became a member of the board of reviewing editors of the journal Science. He has also served on the editorial board of the journals Social Forces, Sociological Forum, Poetics, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, Theory and Society, Sociological Theory, and Journal of World-Systems Research.
Anna Maria Grzymala-Busse is an American political scientist. She is the Michelle and Kevin Douglas Professor of International Studies in the department of political science at Stanford University. She is also a senior fellow at Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and director of The Europe Center at Stanford University. Grzymala-Busse is known for her research on state development and transformation, religion and politics, political parties, informal political institutions, and post-communist politics. Previously, she was the Ronald Eileen Weiser Professor at University of Michigan.
Jerrold Seigel is an American historian who is Professor Emeritus at New York University. He taught for twenty-five years at Princeton University. His book Modernity and Bourgeois Life: Society, Politics and Culture in England, France, and Germany since 1750 (2012), won the 2014 Laura Shannon Prize for "the best book in European studies that transcends a focus on any one country, state, or people to stimulate new ways of thinking about contemporary Europe as a whole." He has been called "one of the greatest practitioners of intellectual history in our time" and sits on the editorial board of the Journal of the History of Ideas.
Nigel Smith is a literature professor and scholar of the early modern world. He is William and Annie S. Paton Foundation Professor of Ancient and Modern Literature and Professor of English at Princeton University, where he has taught since 1999. He is best known for his interdisciplinary work, bridging literature and history, on 17th-century political and religious radicalism and the literature of the English Revolution, including the poetry and prose of John Milton and Andrew Marvell.
Menachem Fisch is an Israeli philosopher. He is the Joseph and Ceil Mazer Professor Emeritus of History and Philosophy of Science, and co-Director of the Frankfurt-Tel Aviv Center for the Study of Religious and Interreligious Dynamics at Tel Aviv University. He is also Senior Fellow of the Goethe University's Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften, Bad Homburg.
Carlos Eduardo Lozada Rodriguez-Pastor is a Peruvian-American journalist and author. He joined The New York Times as an opinion columnist in 2022 after a 17-year career as senior editor and book critic at The Washington Post. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2019 and was a finalist for the prize in 2018. The Pulitzer Board cited his "trenchant and searching reviews and essays that joined warm emotion and careful analysis in examining a broad range of books addressing government and the American experience." He has also won the National Book Critics Circle Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing and the Kukula Award for excellence in nonfiction book reviewing. Lozada was an adjunct professor of political science and journalism with the University of Notre Dame's Washington program, teaching from 2009 to 2021. He is the author of What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era, published in 2020, and The Washington Book: How to Read Politics and Politicians, published in 2024, both with Simon & Schuster.
Susan Laura Mizruchi is professor of English literature and the William Arrowsmith Professor in the Humanities at Boston University. Her research interests include nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature, religion and culture, literary and social theory, literary history, history of the social sciences, and American and Global Film and TV. Since 2016, she has served as the director of the Boston University Center for the Humanities.
Doris Leanna Bergen is a Canadian academic and Holocaust historian. She is the Chancellor Rose and Ray Wolfe Professor of Holocaust Studies at the University of Toronto, the only endowed chair in Canada in Holocaust history. Bergen is also a member of the Academic Advisory Committee of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2018.
Max Bergholz is an American historian of Eastern Europe. He is an assistant professor of History at Concordia University in Montreal, where he holds the James M. Stanford Professorship in Genocide and Human Rights Studies. He has published two books and numerous research papers, as well as magazine articles on the subject of nationalism, violence and genocide, focusing primarily on the Balkans in the 20th century.
A. James McAdams is a political scientist, author, and academic. He is the William M. Scholl Professor of International Affairs at the University of Notre Dame.