Prize competitions were a shared practice across countries and institutions, playing a central role in the 18th-century public sphere, but they have received little scholarly attention. The conference examines these contests through new analytical and theoretical lenses, with an emphasis on comparative and transnational perspectives. Speakers analyse the long-term history of the genre and its rhetorical background while engaging with individual competitions especially from ‘peripheries’ of the Republic of Letters and beyond Europe. The conference thus contributes to an entangled history of this particular medium of the early modern Republic of Letters.
 

Programme

Wednesday, 13 July

Venue: Seminarzentrum, Raum L115, Otto-von-Simson-Str. 26, 14195 Berlin-Dahlem
  

15:30–16:00    
Avi Lifschitz (University of Oxford), Martin Urmann (Freie Universität Berlin)
Welcome and Introduction
 

16:00–17:00    
Martin Urmann (CRC 980 “Episteme in Motion”)
Panegyric, confirmation of the canon, and knowledge production: prize contests as a hybrid medium of public debate
  

  
17:15–18:15 *CANCELLED*
Arjan van Dixhoorn (University College Roosevelt, Middelburg)
Dutch prize contests as a measure of long-term cultural change in Europe
 

17:15–18:15    
Maria Florutau (University of Oxford)
The role of the jury in shaping the prize essay genre in the Netherlands in the second half of the eighteenth century
   

   
Thursday, 14 July

Venue: Villa Engler, Altensteinstraße 2, 14195 Berlin-Dahlem
  

10:00–11:00   
Martin Gierl (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen)
Organizing science: prize contests in Göttingen and the case of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
  

11:00–12:00    
Rita Krueger (Temple University, Philadelphia)
Constructing useful knowledge: essay contests in Habsburg Bohemia and Moravia
  

 
14:00–15:00    
Nicola Miller (University College London)
Competing to define the future: prize contests in independence-era Spanish America
 

15:00–16:00    
Béla Kapossy (EPFL, Lausanne)
‘The spirit of legislation’: the Bernese prize essay competition of 1764
  

  
16.30–17:30    
Juliane Engelhardt (University of Copenhagen)
From science to practice: the role of prize contests in academies and patriotic societies in the Danish-German-Norwegian composite monarchy
 

  
Friday, 15 July

Venue: Villa Engler, Altensteinstraße 2, 14195 Berlin-Dahlem
  

10:00–11:00    
Maria Susana Seguin (Université Paul-Valéry, Montpellier/ENS Lyon)
Prizes and awards at the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris, 1700–1750
   

11:00–12:00 *CANCELLED*
Iwan-Michelangelo D’Aprile (Universität Potsdam)
The transformation of academic prize contests in the aftermath of the French Revolution
 

11:00–12:00    
Kelsey Rubin-Detlev (University of Southern California, Los Angeles)
Popularisation and prestige in the staging of prize contests at the St Petersburg Imperial Academy of Sciences, 1777–1802

   
13:30–14:15
Final discussion