The Nanovic Institute for European Studies at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana has awarded the 2023 Laura Shannon Prize in Contemporary European Studies to Stella Ghervas, a professor of Russian history at Newcastle University, England, and an associate of the department of history at Harvard University.
The $10,000 Laura Shannon Prize, one of the preeminent prizes for European studies, is awarded each year to the best book that transcends a focus on any one country, state, or people to stimulate new ways of thinking about contemporary Europe as a whole. Now in its 14th year, the Laura Shannon Prize is made possible through a generous endowment from Laura Shannon (1939-2021) and her husband, Michael, a member of the Class of 1958 at the University of Notre Dame. Laura Shannon became a member of the Nanovic Institute’s advisory board in 2003 and served for many years.
Professor Ghervas was honored for her book Conquering Peace: From the Enlightenment to the European Union (Harvard University Press, 2021).
In its statement, the award jury praised professor Ghervas’ work as brilliantly conceived, superbly executed. and timely. “Stella Ghervas’ subject matter — postwar peacemaking and international efforts to sustain peace — could hardly be timelier or more important,” the jury wrote. “With a mastery of discrete bodies of scholarship that range from the 17th-century Peace of Westphalia to today’s European Union and its discontents, she compares the diverse ways in which European diplomats and politicians navigated the peace processes that concluded the War of the Spanish Succession, the Napoleonic Wars, World Wars I and II and the Cold War.”
A native of Switzerland, Professor Ghervas is a graduate University of St. Petersburg in Russia. She holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Bucharest in Romania, and a Ph.D. in European studies from the University of Geneva in Switzerland.